


The Time Travel(l)er's Wife

by Lily (alyelle)



Category: The Mighty Boosh RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-09 14:14:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 35,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14717654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyelle/pseuds/Lily
Summary: Julian Barratt is a time-traveller, and Noel Fielding has known him his entire life.





	1. September 1973

_September, 1978: Noel is 5, Julian is 33_  
\--

It’s dark outside.

Noel crawls up onto the little seat under his window, ducking under the curtain so he can see more clearly. It’s not the sort of blue that says morning is almost here and he can go see if Nan’s awake. It’s really dark. Black, almost.

It’s hard to find the stars in London. In France they were easy to see, all white and twinkling, but here they’re hidden. There are lights though, red and white ones which his dad said were planes, and that’s nearly as good. Sometimes he imagines climbing into one, a star or a plane, and flying up as high as he can, to see if London is as tiny from the sky as the planes are from London.

From behind him, there’s a soft thud and a whispered, “ _Ow_.”

Noel jumps down as quickly as he can. If it’s still dark, it’s still his bedtime, and if one of his grandparents finds him up and about again, they’ll definitely tell his parents. But the face he sees in his doorway isn’t his nan or his pop; it’s a very tall man he’s never seen before, who looks a bit lost and is standing on one foot.

“Hello,” Noel says. The man stares at him and says nothing. Nan’s voice in his head reminds him about manners, so he sticks out one hand. “I’m Noel.”

The man mumbles something to himself that sounds like _thank rice_ and steps into his room. He bends down and stretches out his own hand to shake Noel’s. “I’m Julian,” he says. 

Noel thinks hard but he can’t remember meeting anyone called Julian before. He looks at him carefully, in case he’s forgetting, and then shakes his head. “I don’t know you.”

“No.” The man called Julian frowns a bit. It’s not the lost frown from before though, it’s like the one Nan gets when she’s trying to explain something silly, like why Noel should eat his peas. “No, I don’t think you’ve met me yet.”

“Are you friends with mum and dad?”

“Yeah. Kind of.” 

“They’re not here.”

“Oh.” He frowns harder, and looks around Noel’s room. “Where are they?”

Noel shrugs. “Out. Nan and Pop came over, but Nan’ll get cross if you wake her up. Wanna see something?”

“Um… alright.”

Noel pads across the room to his shelf and pulls out the picture of the bird, the first one he did, the one that his teacher liked. When he turns around, Julian’s standing by the end of his bed.

“Can I sit on here?” 

Noel nods, holding out the drawing. Julian sits on the very edge of the bed and takes the sheet of paper from him gently.

“Did you do this?” he asks, and Noel nods again. 

“At school today,” he explains.

“I see.” Julian looks at the picture for a minute and then back to Noel with a smile. “It’s very good.”

He sounds even more proud than the teacher and Noel is suddenly very glad that he showed him. “I did others,” he says, climbing back up onto the bed beside Julian. “My teacher said I could be an artist.”

“So you liked school, then?”

The happy feeling disappears. “It’s okay,” Noel says, because he thinks he should. He wonders if Julian will be able to tell when he’s lying like his parents can. “I liked drawing. But I don’t wanna go back.”

“Why not?”

Noel hates that word, why. His mum asks it a lot – _Why are you in your room, sweetie? Why don’t you come down and say hello? Why are you upset?_ – and he can never find the right words to make her see. He wrinkles up his nose, which sometimes helps the words come, but it doesn’t work tonight. “It’s too big,” he says finally. “The food tastes funny, and they make you eat crusts on your bread, and everyone’s faster than me at games.”

“But you could learn more about art. You could be an artist like your teacher said, and hang your pictures up for everyone in London to see.” 

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

He looks down at his bird drawing and tries to imagine all the people he sees walking down the street looking at it. He doesn’t know why they’d ever want to. It’s just a bird. “Maybe,” he says quietly. 

Julian doesn’t say anything but he makes a sharp hissing noise like a snake. Noel looks up to see him pressing one hand against his head.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.” He sounds hurt, Noel thinks, but he smiles when he takes his hand away. “My head’s just a bit sore. It’s past bedtime.”

“ _You_ have _bedtime_? But you’re a grown up!”

“Everyone has bedtime. Especially grown ups. We have lots of work to do. And _you_ – when’s your bedtime?” 

Noel looks down at his hands, and Julian laughs. 

“I thought so. Come on then.” He stands up, so impossibly tall that he must almost be touching the ceiling, and puts the drawing of the bird back on the shelf Noel took it from. “Let’s get you into bed.”

He turns back the blanket when Noel scrambles down off the bed, and then pulls it up over him, tucking it down at the sides. 

“There you are. All ready for sleep.”

“Are you going now?” Noel asks, knowing what the answer will be even before Julian nods. He’s rubbing at his head again. “Can’t you stay? I can tell you a story.”

“I’m sorry. I... left something behind. At my house.”

“Oh.” Noel fidgets with the edge of the blanket, not sure he wants to be all alone in his bedroom again. It’s still black outside. Morning is forever away. “Do you want me to tell mum and dad you came to visit?”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll come back another time. I promise.”

“Tomorrow?” Noel asks hopefully.

“Maybe not quite that soon.”

“At the weekend?”

Julian smiles. “I’ll try. And you should try and go to sleep, or you’ll be too tired to draw tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” 

Noel wriggles down under the blankets, squashing his pillow until it’s comfortable under his head. Julian waits in the doorway until he stops moving.

“Goodnight, Noel,” he says softly.

“Goodnight!” Noel sticks one hand out from under the blankets and waves. Julian waves back, very quickly, pulling the door closed behind him as he leaves the room. Noel listens for his footsteps to disappear down the hallway, but they don’t come.

Julian must walk very quietly, he thinks.

He rolls onto his side, poking at his pillow a bit more and closes his eyes. The sooner he sleeps, the sooner it’s tomorrow, and tomorrow is one day closer to the weekend.


	2. May 1984

_May, 1984: Julian is 16 and 31_  
\--

It starts on his sixteenth birthday like a stupid fairy story.

This one’s obviously special somehow, because Julian’s grandparents drive over from Wakefield instead of the other way around. For the past fifteen years, according to his memory and his mother's photograph albums, they’ve celebrated his birthday in his grandparents' tidy conservatory, surrounded by potted plants and neat blue tiles. He’s never known why, but that’s how it is. It’s how it’s always been. Having it in his own dining room breaks a pattern that’s as much a part of him as his fingers and toes, and leaves a tide of unease washing through him. The looks his grandparents keep giving him don’t help matters; by the end of tea, there’s a tension in the air he can just about touch. 

He’s not the only one who can feel it. When they’ve finished the cake and presents, his mother makes a fuss of putting his sister to bed, ignoring her protests that she’s not tired yet and anyway, she’s _twelve_ now and shouldn’t have to go to bed until at least nine o’clock. His grandmother vanishes a few seconds later, murmuring about making tea, but no noise drifts out from the kitchen to the sitting room. 

Julian’s grandfather looks at him once more, drawing in a deep, measured breath. And then his father – his sensible, geography teacher father, who taught him that dragons and aliens and monsters under the bed weren’t real – pulls a small, old-fashioned hourglass from his pocket and explains in a quiet voice Julian’s never heard before that their family was cursed in the nineteenth century and are now forced to travel in time.

“We don’t travel,” his grandfather interrupts. “We... slip. In and out. Travelling implies purpose.”

His father nods slowly. “True. That’s important, Jules: it’s involuntary. You won’t be able to control it.”

Julian stares at him. Every possible reply he can think of turns to dust in his mouth. His father holds the hourglass out to him. 

“This is yours now.”

He takes it without thinking. It’s barely two inches tall and impossibly light. It almost looks like an egg timer, except the glass wells are different, rounder than normal and filled with pale gold beads, each one the size of a pin-head. Three twisting columns of brass encase them, twining like vines up the outside. Julian’s name is etched on the bottom in thin, filigree script.

“It used to be my name on there,” his father says. His voice is still pitched low, tinged with a melancholy that makes him sound so much older than he is. “And your grandfather’s before that.”

“Why?”

“Spite,” says his grandfather, and Julian’s father frowns at him.

“Dad- ”

“It _was_ , Andy. Don’t you go getting sentimental again. It were nowt but spite.” He turns to Julian, passing over a small, leather-bound book. “It’s in there, lad. A hundred and fifty years of Pettifer history, back to your third great-grandfather Barnabas. He were the first. Got on the wrong side of a gypsy lass, and she cursed him good and proper for it.”

“He said they were in love,” his dad interrupts. “That was his journal, originally, that book. He wrote about her. And her family.” 

“What happened?”

His dad spreads his hands, a gesture Julian recognises all too well – it’s the same helpless, regretful motion he makes whenever Julian asks about why the miners are striking, exactly, or why so many people voted for Mrs. Thatcher if everyone hates her this much. “You have to understand, Jules, this people have never been treated well. They’ve been persecuted throughout history. In Victorian times, many were killed, or sent to the colonies with convicts. The girl your grandfather wrote about, Lovina, she was staying with her family on the outskirts of the village he lived in. He never wrote about how they met, only that he loved her, and that his family didn’t understand. He was only sixteen,” he adds softly. “Too young for any of it. But they were different times, back then.”

He leans over and takes the book from Julian’s lap, brushing his fingers across its cover as he continues.

“His father expected him to marry a girl from the village. One of their own, you know. Barnabas writes that he wanted to marry Lovina, but she would have had to leave her family behind – or he would have. And he thought about it. There’s an entry... here it is. April 4th, 1827. ‘The watchmen took them at dawn. I cannot but blame myself - would they have been so near still if not for me? My answer was all that she waited on. And more, I could give no help; the charge was thievery. The Greenwoods bore witness, and the Walkers, and the Jewetts. Lovina is no thief, I know it. I tried to tell the watch that they do us no harm, but none listened. Even she turned her face away from me until the very last.’” 

His dad sets the book down. “She thought he’d chosen to stay, to marry the girl from his village, and that he’d informed on them to avoid a scene. The story goes that she threw him that,” he gestures to the hourglass Julian is still clutching tightly in his fist, “as they were being led away, pronouncing a curse on his son and the son of his son. And the travelling began.” 

“Slipping,” says Julian’s grandfather with a soft tut.

“Slipping, then.”

“How did she know he’d have a son though?” Julian frowns, turning the words over in his mind. “What if he hadn’t? Uncle John’s only got daughters.”

“Your Uncle John weren’t the eldest,” his grandfather replies. “It’s part of the curse. The firstborn son will always have a son, sooner or later. It were more’n twenty years before Barnabas finally took a wife, but when he did, his only child were a boy - my grandfather Joseph. It’s all in there.” He points at the book, his gnarly old finger carrying more than a hint of accusation as it stabs the air.

“I know this is hard,” his father says in soothing tones. “It was for me too. You’ll get used to it, in time. We all do.”

“How many times?” Julian digs the fingers of his empty hand into the soft, worn side of his armchair. It’s reassuringly normal under his touch, a talisman to ward off the coldness of the hourglass in his other hand. “How many times do I have to... slip?”

“As many as it takes for the beads to fall. It varies from person to person. Your great-grandfather Wilfred only went once every few years. Mine were almost weekly at one point.” He pauses, gazing into the middle distance sadly. “It’s been three and a half years since my last, and I’ve spent every moment since dreading the day those letters would change to spell out your name instead of mine. But here we are. I’m sorry, Jules.” 

He should laugh. Maybe that would be enough to make the two of _them_ laugh, tell him they’re only kidding, but gosh, didn’t they have him going. Instead Julian finds himself numbly asking, “What happens?”

“You’ll feel sick. A headache, usually, that’s the first sign. Sometimes dizziness... sometimes fever. If you can, try and get somewhere quiet where you can be alone. The first rule is don’t get caught.”

“No, the first rule is don’t interfere!” His grandfather leans forward, a deep crease in his forehead now, no laughter in sight. “That’s the most important thing. Don’t you tell yourself, or anyone else, too much. It’s like this: if you go back, say, five years, whatever you tell to your younger self has the potential to affect your actions for the _next_ five years. Now, sometimes, that’s helpful. Sometimes the only reason we get anywhere is because an older self set us off on the right path. But if you tell someone else about the future, you affect all their actions as well, and you can’t – you can’t make the same adjustments you would if it were you. And if you tell yourself too much... it sticks in your head. You start getting confused, you don’t remember whether memories are something you did or something you told yourself. Too much of that and you’ll drive yourself mad.”

“But the second rule is don’t get caught,” continues his dad. “Trust me, it’s very hard to explain why there’s a man who looks just like you in the background of your wedding photographs.”

The mention of weddings brings Julian’s mother to the forefront of his mind. He looks around on impulse, half-scared she and his grandmother have come back without him noticing. “Does mum know?” 

“Of course. Bit hard to hide it for this long.”

“And grandma?” He looks over to his grandad, who nods.

“Aye. And you’ll have to tell whoever you marry, one day. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh?”

Julian takes a deep breath. The hourglass in his hand is growing heavier by the minute, etching the insanity of this whole situation into his flesh; his brain is fizzing tiredly like television static. He rubs at his eyes with his free hand. Neither his father nor his grandfather has so much as smiled since they sat down. If this is a joke, it’s clearly going to last for longer than tonight.

“It’ll be okay, Jules. It’ll take some getting used to but it’ll be okay.” His dad stands, pressing a hand gently to his shoulder. “You look like you do with some sleep.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll put this away until tomorrow, then.” He picks up the book once more. “Go on with you. And say goodnight to mum and your gran.”

“Yes, dad,” Julian repeats. He slips the hourglass into his pocket as he stands. “G’night grandad.”

“Aye, goodnight lad.” And the smile finally comes - one of the rare, soft ones Julian never sees anymore but remembers from when he was very young. “And for what it’s worth, happy birthday.”

“Sleep well,” says his dad, and Julian nods as he places one leaden foot in front of the other, over and over until he’s in the dark, silent hallway.

He has his first trip not three hours later.

It starts with pain: a sudden, violent pain that wrenches him from sleep and leaves him sitting bolt upright in bed, heart thundering in his chest, fighting a wave of nausea. It feels like barely any time has passed since he put out the light and lay staring blindly into the dark, turning his father’s nonsensical words over and over in his mind. But there’s grit in the corners of his eyes now, and pallid moonlight is seeping in around the curtains. The house is asleep and Julian is alone in a room that is – quite literally – spinning.

There’s a terrible throbbing between his temples. His hands are shaking and slick with sweat, and he fists them tightly in the blankets, scrunching his eyes closed again as his stomach gives a particularly violent lurch.

He opens them to a dimly-lit room he’s never seen before in his life.

He takes a deep breath; the air’s blessedly cold, and he does it again, then a third time, swallowing huge lungfuls of cool until his stomach feels calm and his heart’s no longer climbing out his throat. He’s perched at the very end of a bed that’s definitely not his – it’s twice as big, for a start, and most of it is covered with brightly coloured shirts. There’s a stack of notebooks resting haphazardly near the pillows. One of the bedside tables is littered with bottles of nail polish and sweets’ wrappers; the other is home to an assortment of flyers, another pile of books, and a slightly crumpled packet of cigarettes.

Julian moves dazedly towards the one with the flyers, trying to make out what the bright red letters on the top one spell. His foot catches on something halfway there. He twists quickly, arms flailing in a desperate attempt to keep his balance or at least avoid crashing face first into the little wooden cabinet, and ends half-sprawled on the bed with a book digging into his shoulder blades and a mop with eyes lying over his chest. The lamp topples off the bedside table and falls somewhere near his right ear.

His head throbs a little more violently.

He pushes himself up, letting the mop-with-a-face drop to the floor with a muffled clank. He’s just reaching for the lamp to set it to rights when there’s a soft voice behind him.

“Hey, Bee.”

Julian whips around, wishing belatedly that he hadn’t; his head thumps hard enough to bring the queasiness back. There’s a man standing in the doorway, half-hidden by shadows. 

“How are you feeling?”

“Who are you? How do you know my name?” _No one_ knows that nickname, save for his mum and dad. And only his mum uses it anymore; his dad always calls him Jules, unless he’s cross. 

“They gave you the hourglass tonight, didn’t they?” The voice is gentle. Its owner steps forward into the room. In the lamplight, Julian can see him more clearly: he’s about as tall as his dad, but skinnier, and with darker hair that sprawls over his forehead in unruly curls.

“What? How do you know about _that_?” Julian hisses. The man in front of him says nothing, just quirks the corner of his mouth in a rueful smile, and Julian is halfway through opening his mouth to demand _Who are you?_ once more when he realises he doesn’t need to ask. He’s seen those ridiculous curls countless mornings in his own bedroom mirror. He’s felt that apologetic resignation every time he brought home a rubbish test result to his dad.

“Are you... you’re _me_ , aren’t you?” he whispers, and the taller man nods.

“’Fraid so.”

Julian sits, very heavily, back down on the bed.

“How are you feeling?” his older self asks again and Julian grimaces.

“Bit sick.”

“I’ll make some tea. It’ll help,” he adds, when Julian starts to protest.

Five minutes later he’s sipping a mug of strong, dark tea that does indeed seem to be reducing the throbbing at his temples and the roiling in his stomach. 

“Better?”

Julian nods. “It’s good. Mum’s is always too sweet.”

“I know. I didn’t think I liked tea until... tonight, actually.” The familiar half-grin works its way back onto his face. “It calms your stomach better than anything else you’ll try.”

“Should you be telling me that? Dad said - I mean, I might not try anything else at all now, knowing that.”

“You will. Because I did.”

It’s quite weird, Julian decides, talking to yourself in the future, if only because neither of them are sure which pronoun to use at any given point. But it’s somehow less strange hearing about slipping through time from this older Julian than it was hearing it from his dad and grandad. By the time his future self finishes, he feels almost settled in the softly lit room.

Which is, of course, the perfect time for a loud clunk to echo from the hallway and send him darting half a foot out of his chair.

His future self gets to his feet, muttering something to himself as Julian looks frantically around to make sure he hasn’t spilt the remains of his tea. 

“It’s alright, don’t worry about it. Just wait here a sec, yeah?”

Julian gives his lap a last look, setting the mug out of the way on the bedside table. There’s a slow creak from out in the hall, and another heavy clunk – the lock turning, Julian realises with a flush of embarrassment. Just someone else coming home. 

A sweet, gentle voice drifts into the room.

“Missed you.” 

His eyes find the bedside table on the other side of the room again, dotted with polish bottles and foil wrappers, and a smile spreads slowly across his face. If this is his future self’s bedroom, then that has to be his future self’s girlfriend. 

He’s halfway to congratulating himself when a searing pain stabs through his temples and his vision goes black.


	3. June 1986

 

_June, 1986: Julian is 18_  
\--

> _Point A lies on the curve C, expressed by the function f(x) = x2(9-2x). Solve for A._

 

Julian reads the equation on the page in front of him a second time, then a third, before finally letting his head hang with a sigh. His eyelids are growing heavier by the minute, threatening to leave him face-first in yet another textbook. He lets them droop closed now, pressing against them tightly with the heels of his palms. His temples are pounding. He finds himself wishing audibly, so fervently it could be a prayer, that this is just a headache and not another impending trip – and he refuses to think of it as slipping. Those two tiny letters, turning passivity into agency, are all that stands between him and the whims of a bitter teenage girl.

He’s travelled every night this week and last. His head swims constantly with what he’s been able to piece together from the pages of his grandfather’s great-grandfather’s diary, read and re-read between the endless hours of revision for his final exams.

 

> _A curse sets out through six generations on a Wednesday. Assume time is the spiral f(x) = ln(x) and that the curse follows the regular pattern, [r(t) = lnt]. Solve for x, where x equals the root of the curse._

 

He lifts his head slowly, unable to help a glance to his right where the dusty-leaved book rests. Over the past two years, he’s scoured every inch of it. He’s made notes and more notes, and has taken advantage of the past three weeks’ unrestricted access to his school’s library facilities to search as many old, moldering histories as he can.

He still has no idea what the curse actually means.

Without thinking, he draws the book closer, thumbing to a passage now seared into his memory: _I curse you, Barnabas, first-born of Thomas. Let you and your son, and every first-born son to come, remember this day, until this day shall come again._

The first part is easy; it’s the final six words that are driving him ever more mad. At first he tried reasoning it through, the way his English teacher has taught him to analyse riddles and essay questions. The obvious answer would be a literal repetition, a slip back to the day of Lovina’s curse, but as far as he can tell from the scribblings in the diary, Barnabas never went back to that day and all his other ancestors only ever travelled to points in their own lifetimes, to places that involved them or their families. His father and grandfather, when Julian felt brave enough to bring up this ridiculous inheritance, both said the same was true for them. Julian has a strong suspicion he’s not going to be the one to suddenly break that pattern. He’s not remarkable; his gifts are maths and music, not crusading in time like some real-life Doctor Who.

He’s tried numbers, too, but they make any sense either. There have been 8300 Wednesdays since 1827 and twenty-three of those have been on April 4th. It can’t _just_ be the day, or the date. There has to be something else, some key to breaking both riddle and curse. His eyes run over those words again.

“I don’t know what you _mean_!” he groans at the diary, frustration and exhaustion rushing through his body.

“You right, Jules?”

His dad. He lets the book drop back onto his desk, pushing it surreptitiously under a sheaf of papers as he turns toward the doorway. “Aye. Just maths.”

“Owt I can do?”

“No. No,” he repeats, sighing. “Thanks dad. I’m just - I’m so tired. These exams. This...”

“It’ll pass,” his dad replies, no need to hear the rest of the sentence.

“So you and pop keep telling me.”

“And just see if we’re wrong.” His dad steps into the dimly lit room and leans over to ruffle Julian’s hair, the way he used to do when Julian was young and couldn’t sleep, before time travel or curses had ever entered his vocabulary. “Put this away for now, eh?” he says, gesturing to the spill of crumpled paper, highlighters, and textbooks littering the desk. “It’ll do you no good to wear yourself out. And in any case, there’s more to life than A levels.”

“Should you be saying that?” Julian asks, squinting askance, and his dad laughs like it’s summer, tapping the side of his nose with his finger.

“I won’t tell if you won’t. Come on now. Off with you.”

“A’right, dad. Goodnight.”

“’Night Jules.”

Once he’s gone, Julian extracts the diary from under his maths revision notes. He shuffles the papers into a semblance of order, stacks them on top of the three heavy textbooks he’s been lugging about for the past two days, and finally lets himself flop back onto his bed. The diary falls just beyond his fingertips up near his pillow. Julian falls asleep within seconds.

For the first night in a fortnight, he doesn’t travel anywhere.


	4. December 1978

_December, 1978: Noel is 5, Julian is 33_  
\--

It’s almost dark outside.

Noel pushes back off the window seat, returning to the papers and crayons strewn across his duvet. He picks up the top sheet as he sits down, tilting his head to one side, looking it over carefully. It’s almost done. Almost. Something is missing, but he can’t quite work out what, no matter which way he looks at it. His eyes stray over the page restlessly as if they’ll catch the lost thing hiding in a corner, behind an arc of purple or a splotch of green, if they can just move quickly and quietly enough. 

Soft strains of music drift up from the front room; Nan must have won the argument about whether to watch the game show or The Snow Queen. For a moment Noel is tempted to run down and curl up beside her, to fill his mind with chilly blues, sulky greys, and soft fluffy whites, until whatever is lost comes out of hiding.

A soft thump and a muffled ‘ _Ow_!’ stop him in his tracks.

Noel jumps off the bed and runs to the doorway. His mum’s voice calls out from downstairs.

“You right, love?”

There’s an ashen-faced, messy-haired man standing at the end of the hallway. His eyes are wide. He looks a bit lost again – or still, perhaps; maybe he _always_ looks lost – but both his feet are on the floor this time. 

“Yeah!” Noel shouts happily, grinning at Julian, who has started tiptoeing towards him. “Playin’ Mr Wolf!”

“By yourself?” 

A moment of dead, horrible silence follows her question. Noel looks at Julian, who has frozen like a statue in the Snow Queen’s garden, one foot half in the air and one hand splayed against the wall to steady himself. His face is somehow even paler than before, his eyes wider. Noel thinks he might be holding his breath. His eyebrows seem to be the only living part of him, moving up and down in a dance that Noel knows means _say something_ , but Noel’s voice has gone running off down to his toes. He’s seized by the sudden, awful feeling that his mum is coming upstairs to check on him, even though she never does that. He’s about to grab Julian’s sleeve and tug him into the bedroom to hide when she calls out again. 

“Just be careful, plum.”

As quickly as it came, the panic floods out of him. “A’right!” he calls, his voice swirling and dancing back up through his body to its proper place.

Julian slumps, letting out a silent sigh as his foot touches the ground, and Noel’s fingers do reach for his sleeve this time, twisting into the dark blue wool of his sweater. He whispers around his grin, “It’s you!”

“It is,” Julian whispers back, peering over the banister and down the staircase. “Was that your mum?”

“Yeah.” 

“Who else is here?”

“Dad, and Nan, and Pop somewhere.”

“I see.” 

He turns away from the staircase and ducks through the bright yellow door into Noel’s bedroom. Noel follows, asking as he goes, “What are you doing here?”

“I – well, I came to see you. Like I... said I would?”

“But it’s been ages!”

“Has it?” 

Noel nods. “Uh-huh. I thought you were _never_ coming back. Even school is finished!”

“Sorry.” Julian sits gently on the end of his bed, the same way he did last time. Noel starts stacking the drawings scattered beside him into a neater pile. “I… I’m not very good with time.”

“Like The Doctor?” 

“Which doctor?”

Noel looks up from his tidying. “ _The_ Doctor,” he repeats, raising his eyebrows, but Julian just keeps staring, a confused frown wrinkling his forehead. “Doctor Who! We’re watching it now. Well. Not _right_ now, ‘cos it’s not on at Christmas and anyway Mum and Dad were watching the Queen before, and now Nan’s watching the Snow Queen – I like her better, you know, she’s got all the blue and white fluffies, the other one’s just got a big crown. But on Saturday it was on, and next week too. They’re on the moon. Actually not _the_ moon,” he corrects, thinking back to the episode. “But _a_ moon. They’re building a key of time. ‘Cos the Doctor travels in space and has adventures, but sometimes he gets the time wrong.”

Julian opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, but it chomps shut again before any sound comes out. His eyebrows are slowly creeping closer to one another. He’s blinking quite a lot, sort of like Nan does when she complains about her nerves and that she just needs a cup of tea, really. 

Noel stops for moment, thinking quickly. Maybe Julian hasn’t seen Doctor Who? Maybe he doesn’t watch television; his friend Simon’s parents don’t watch anything at all except in the holidays, and never cartoons or the football. He’s about to ask when something else occurs to him.

“Hey, do you travel in space too?”

Julian stops blinking and stares at him for a long minute. Finally he gives a weak little chuckle. “No. No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“That’s okay.” Noel hops up to sit on the box-seat under the window, drumming his heels against it lightly. Just for a second he imagines drawing planets seen from a police box piloted by Julian, the planes so far below them they look like ants, the moon’s wide grin following them through the stars. “But maybe we should build you a key of time too. Then you won’t get it wrong next time.”

Julian smiles at him, properly, like he’s said something clever. “Yeah. Maybe we should do that one day.”

A dark, square shape tugs in the back of Noel’s mind. Something is missing here, too. He tilts his head to one side, looking over Julian slowly, carefully, like he’s one of his drawings. 

“Julian? If you don’t travel in space, how’d you get inside?”

Julian peers back at him just carefully, then waggles his eyebrows like caterpillars. “Back door,” he says.

Noel laughs out loud. “Genius,” he breathes. He’d learnt that word in his last week of school. He likes the way it feels in his mouth, all butter-soft and comfortable round the edges.

Julian turns, gesturing to the stack of papers Noel has sat up near pillow. “You’ve been drawing again.”

“Yeah.”

“Gonna be an artist after all then?”

“Maybe,” he shrugs.

“What’s this one? Your family?” He picks up the page on top, the unfinished one.

“Yeah,” Noel says again, hopping down to point at the figures on the page. “That’s Nan, with mince pies and a purple Christmas crown. She had one last year too. Pop said she should’ve had a green or red one, but she said purple was best ‘cos purple is the queen’s colour – the real queen, not the Snow Queen – and she’s queen of this family thank-you-very-much. And that’s Pop, with the orange one. That’s his favourite colour. I don’t think there’s orange Christmas crowns in our crackers but there should be, Pop would like that. And that’s Mum by the tree and Dad, he’s got red o’course, like always.”

“I see.”

“There’s something lost though. Just here. I can’t-” 

He’s gesturing to the left hand side of the page when his mum’s voice reaches up the stairs again.

“Noel, plum, Planet of the Apes is starting!”

He drops the page and shouts out quickly in the direction of his doorway. “Coming!” He turns back to Julian apologetically. “Sorry.”

‘S’okay.” Julian rubs a hand absently across his forehead. “I’ve got to go anyway.”

“But you’ll come back again?”

“Yeah. But... it might be a while, right? The thing is, I’m maybe a bit like your doctor after all.”

“That’s alright. We’ll make you a key of time. It’ll be _amazing_.”

“I bet it will.” Julian starts towards the door. “You go on downstairs to your mum. I can let myself out.”

“Back door?” Noel asks with a grin.

“Back door,” Julian repeats, and winks as he strides quickly, and oh so quietly, out of the room. Noel follows but by the time he’s reached the door, Julian has already disappeared from sight. He waves anyway, in the direction of the stairs, the barest hints of awe and annoyance drifting through his mind that Julian can not only get down them that quickly, but that he can do it without making any squeaky sounds. 

Crossing the room once more, he picks up the drawing, looking down at it one last time. His mum, his dad. Nan and Pop. A Christmas tree and Nan’s cat Jethro creeping across the front of it; stacks of presents, fluoro tinsel on the ceiling and –

With quick hands, Noel smooths the paper out on the floor and grabs his crayons from the box on his bedside table. He sketches in the little window in the kitchen that looks onto the back garden in the left hand corner of the page. He lingers for a moment on its curtains, taking care to draw the bows in long, uneven loops, the way Nan ties them when she comes to stay. Beside the window he draws the dark wooden kitchen doorway, leaving a crack of white with splaying lines of light yellow, to show that it’s open. And – finally – peering around the door’s opening, he adds in a smiling figure with messy brown hair, a shiny silver key gripped tight in his hand.


	5. October 1988

 

_October, 1988: Julian is 20_  
\--

There’s a month at the end of summer – thirty-four days, to be precise – where Julian doesn’t travel at all.

He doesn’t notice the first night. The exhaustion of moving half his belongings down to Reading, of unpacking, of finding his pyjamas, his socks for tomorrow, the electric sockets, his toothbrush – all take their toll and he crawls blearily into bed at 9pm, his eyes closing before he can even put the lamp out. He wakes in the early hours of the morning that follows, groggy and confused by the unfamiliar room. As he rubs the sleep from his eyes trying to work out where and when he is, Julian spots the pile of half-unpacked boxes at the foot of the bed and realises with a rush of pleasure he very rarely feels anymore that these are _meant_ to be unfamiliar surroundings.

The second night he’s equally exhausted. He’s spent most of his first day on campus darting around amidst a sea of lost faces and university societies, looking for shortcuts and hiding places, preparing for the inevitable. He’s sitting on the floor sorting through half-used notebooks and last minute timetable changes, thanking his luck and any gods that will listen that he didn’t have to share a room, when he realises with a start that, in spite of the stress, he hasn’t slipped anywhere in two full days.

He barely sleeps for the rest of his orientation week, waiting for the whirlwind of displaced time that plagued his A levels and summer holidays to return, dreading the plunge out of unconsciousness and into a section of his past or future. He waits for the nausea, for dizzy disorientation. It doesn’t arrive. Instead, he wakes up at every footfall that passes under his window, every bark that is carried on the breeze across the Thames Valley. A second week begins, and then passes. Julian relearns how to fall asleep without the expectation of a sudden, unwanted awakening.

By the third week, he’s begun to remember what peace feels like.

The first trip, when it finally does happen, is so vivid that Julian goes digging for his grandfather’s diary as soon as he’s back in his own time. He hasn’t touched it since before his exam period, when he was spending hours each day in the school library. He’s thought about it every so often, worrying at the puzzle of that curse like a loose tooth, but he’s never been able to get any closer to solving it. Writing about his own little slips, back to his childhood bedroom or last week’s trip to buy groceries, seems wrong somehow; the minutiae of his early life cannot co-exist with the faint, spidery lines of his ancestors’ eighteenth and nineteenth century vocabularies. His frail thoughts on what this curse might mean have been better delivered by hands older, wiser, and more sure than his own.

This time, it’s different. When he slips back to real time, it is with the sense that there’s something just behind or beyond his perception, a wisp of feeling that this trip wasn’t just random. It urges him to pick out his nicest pen and press it to the empty, yellowing pages that follow his father’s last entry.

He dates his entry in the same way the others are, longhand, following the format his grandfather’s great grandfather first used. “ _October 1st, 1988._ ”

Julian sucks on the end of his pen for a brief moment, considering his opening. Then he inks, in small neat letters, his slip from semi-sleep to sudden wakefulness. Not all of his ancestors included the symptoms that preceded a trip, so he puts those down: the slight vertigo that lingered at his temples as he brushed his teeth, the yawns that had almost cracked his jaw as he was getting into bed. The restless tingling in the soles of his feet as he waited for sleep to claim him.

He lets his hand flow gently over the page, feeling it steady as he goes. The memory of his trip is still bright in his mind, but he casts back carefully anyway, methodically noting down each detail: the thick, grey fog that clung close around him, working tendrils into his nostrils and lungs; the blurriness of the pond to his right and the passers by, as if his periphery had been smeared with vaseline, as well as his mind’s unwillingness to turn and bring them into focus; the searing red of the sweets shop’s awning, and his rising panic that someone other than the sandy-haired boy waving at him from the window had noticed him turn up out of the blue in the middle of the footpath. He closes with an estimation of how long he had been there (“– _a minute or two? Long enough for that fog to start freezing my lungs from the inside out, and for me to wonder if I’d somehow ended up in Madrid instead of Reading when I slipped back._ ”), then tucks the book under his mattress and lies back against his pillows, taking slow breaths until sleep comes.

The next night he travels again, and returns with the same ultra-vivid colours imprinted on his retinas, the same sense that he’s been given a puzzle piece but without any clue as to where it belongs. The feeling that he’s supposed to solve something intensifies as he describes the little yard he’d found himself in, the woodpile stacked neatly next to the little shed, and the child sitting on top of that shed, playing with a grey tabby cat. This trip was just as quick as the previous one - he took a breath and one step, the child looked up from the cat, mouth and eyes widening into comical O’s as his eyes found Julian, and all in the same instant the cat and child had started to scramble down from the shed roof as Julian’s world spun like a fairground ride and dissolved away into his new bedroom.

It’s a week before the next trip, seven days so filled with new faces and assessment guidelines that Julian hardly has the time to notice that he’s sleeping through the night again or that both times he has slipped, he’s recovered more quickly than he had during his A levels.

This one is gentle, the colours slightly muted. It’s preceded by a dozen or so signs he’s now learnt to recognise. He spends his afternoon fighting waves of tiredness and flashes of light in his periphery. The second his class on the beat poets and the American dream is over, he flees to his room by the shortest route possible, and shrugs on a heavier jumper and a jacket. It’s not as though the day is overly warm anyway, and frankly, he’s sick of risking frostbite every time he slips to a blustering wintery day. Easier to take clothing off than to breathe in icicles.

He’s halfway through reading Ginsberg’s _Transcription of Organ Music_ when it happens; he’s yawning and shifting position on the settee when suddenly he’s outside sitting on a park bench, the skeletons of trees surrounding him and a pond winking white-blue down the slope.

It’s bright but cold. The pond appears to be frozen over and Julian congratulates himself on the jacket as he looks around, trying to find his bearings. Hardly anyone is out. Usually this means it’s a weekday and either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, the time generally occupied by small groups of pensioners and new mothers. Sure enough, when he looks to his left, there’s a toddler wrapped up in a puffy red parka, tiny legs flailing as it runs up and back along the path that snakes around the pond. He can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl, but he’s sure it’s not him. He doesn’t recognise this street, or the park or the pond, and the two adults a hundred feet away, huddled together and cooing at their child, are _definitely_ not his mum and dad.

Julian studies them for a moment, trying to place them amongst the branches of his family tree. If he’s here, he’s connected to one of them somehow. They’re the only other people in sight, for one, and although he’s scanned the horizon through a full three-sixty degrees, his eyes are strangely determined not to look elsewhere. _That’s new_ , he thinks – and then remembers that it isn’t, exactly. He’d felt it last week too, outside that sweets shop with the bright red awning, when he couldn’t focus on-

The pond. He whips around, and sure enough it’s nestled there across the street: a fire-engine red awning and a heavy door with gilt lettering, toffees and chocolates and rainbow boiled sweets all piled on little stands in the big front window. The awning over it is the same colour as the baby’s parka.

Julian spins back around; the toddler is now ten feet away from its parents, who are laughing as they move to follow it up the pathway. Even as he watches, they start to dissolve, and his eyes squeeze shut of their own accord as he’s sucked back into his proper time.

The dizziness fades after a few seconds, quicker this time than ever before. Julian gives it another moment, just in case, taking a deep breath as he waits. His eyes fall on the Ginsberg, lying open on the settee at the page he’d left off at.

 

> _– time’s left its remnants and qualities for me to use—my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves._

 

He walks to his room on legs that shake only a little and digs the diary out from under his mattress, scribbling down his memories while they’re still fresh. Again there is a knocking under his brain, an insistence that there’s something _here_ , something above randomosity, that he is being taught a vital lesson in another language but if he just listens closely enough, he’ll understand it anyway.

He flicks back through the pages, skimming his entries from the week before, scoring faint underlines with a pencil. The pond. The boy with the sandy gold hair. The red parka. _My texts, my manuscripts, my loves._

There is a pattern here, Julian thinks. It’s still a puzzle, still in code, but he has the corner pieces now. It’s just a matter of time before he solves it.


	6. March 1989

_March, 1989: Noel is 15, Julian is 40_  
\--

It happens quick as blinking; the pitch is empty, then it’s not. Noel looks down to line up the ball and when he lifts his head, there's a man standing right in front of the goal net. He’s facing the other way but Noel recognises him immediately.

“Oi!” he calls. The figure in front of the net spins around, squinting at him. Noel waves, unable to stop a grin splitting his face.

Julian doesn’t move.

Rather than stoop to collect it, Noel kicks the ball towards the net, calling out as he jogs after it. “Julian! It’s me.”

He’s close enough now to see the frown etched across Julian’s forehead. “Noel?”

“Yeah,” he says breathily, drawing to a halt. He dips down to pick up the football, clutching it to him as Julian’s eyes give him a once, then twice, over.

“You grew.”

“Just a bit.”

“How old are you now?”

“Sixteen, nearly.”

“I see.” An odd, rueful sort of look crosses Julian’s face. 

Noel moves without meaning to, circling around Julian where he stands. His mind whirls as he goes, colours blooming across the blank canvases that have been taunting him for years now. There’s no back door on a football pitch. There’s no corners to disappear around. He’d been alone – and then he hadn’t. He comes to a standstill once more and shifts the ball to the crook of his elbow, regarding the man in front of him. 

“Whatcha doing here?” he asks, watching for signs of the struggle he’s certain will follow. He _saw_ Julian appear out of thin air. How many answers can there be?

“Just… passing through.”

“Yeah? Through where?” 

And there it is, panic emerging on cue. Julian’s fingers begin to clench; his eyes duck left, then right. He starts shifting slightly from foot to foot. They both remain silent. Noel lets a smile play about his lips for effect, but as he runs once more through the facts – insofar as he knows them – a voice at the back of his mind starts urging him to speak again, to put the man out of his misery. He supposes, if he’s honest, that it has a point. It probably _isn’t_ fair to let Julian suffer: he had told him the truth, more or less, that night at Christmas all those years ago. Or at least, he hadn’t denied it. “ _I’m maybe a bit like your doctor after all_.” Noel still remembers those words; they’d echoed through his brain long after Julian had vanished and the new year had arrived. It’s hardly Julian’s fault that he’s started questioning the validity of time travel in the last ten years. That’s a failing of his school Physics department.

Noel allows another beat to pass, then concedes to the internal harangue. “I know you’re not from round here,” he says, letting the ball drop back to the ground, attempting nonchalance. “And you’re not one of my parents’ friends.”

“No.” 

The answer comes quicker than he’d expected. Julian’s voice is surprisingly calm, a note of something like relief tinging the edges.

“And you’re the wrong age sometimes,” he presses, in spite of the admission. He’s filled with the sudden need to be _sure_ , just this once. So much of his life is unknown or upside down, these days, all twisted and topsy-turvy. “You were younger the last time I saw you, but the time before that you looked almost the same as you do now, and I was a kid then.”

The last traces of Julian’s panic have all but vanished. In its place is a careful attentiveness, somehow wary and patient and gentle all at once. “When was the last time?” Julian asks softly.

“Properly? In my backyard when Mike was a baby. He’s eight now, by the way.” Noel stops for just a second, garnering his thoughts to him like armour before he plunges into this fray. There’ll be no going back once he says it. “But I think I’ve seen you since then. Like walking ahead of me round a corner, or in a shop, but when I look again, you’ve gone. I started to think that maybe – maybe I’d just made you up.”

It’s harder to speak that last sentence than he’d thought it would be. Breathing out a heavy sigh, Noel drops to sit cross-legged on the grass beside the football. It’s still damp with morning dew. He wonders if he should warn Julian, who’s tugging up his trouser legs slightly to copy him, but before he can get the words out, he’s sat down as well. 

They’re almost the same height, seated. Noel takes this chance to study Julian’s face, searching it and his memory for the changes since last time, for the things that have remained the same. He looks like he hasn’t shaved for a few days; salt and pepper stubble lines his jaw. He looks… quite good. Noel’s sternum gives a tiny hitch at that realisation. A tremor he’s been noticing more and more often of late rumbles through him. His breaths come short again, catching round his larynx, and he can’t pretend it has anything to do with running, not now; it keeps on happening like this, any time he speaks to an older man. _An older, decent-looking man_ , his brain reminds him slyly. He swats at the thought as though it’s a mayfly he can drive off, and clears his throat, trying his best to keep his still too-young voice steady. 

“You really do travel in time, don’t you?”

Julian looks at him dead-on, his answer as flat and sure as concrete. “Yes.”

There’s a moment of cold, heavy quiet before Noel manages to squeak out a “ _How_?” and finds himself swept up in a story of Julian’s sixteenth birthday; of a cake and a curse; of lies and spurned lovers, an hourglass and an ancient diary, both so beautiful in the telling that he aches to look at them. He imagines them, burnished and brittle, as Julian continues, describing his days, his trips into Noel’s own past and other places, to himself, his family, the people who matter.

“It sounds like a fairy tale,” Noel breathes when Julian finally finishes speaking. They’ve been sitting so long that the fog has cleared off, and he can see the puffs of dragon cloud as he breathes the cold March air in and out. His feet have gone numb. He stretches out his legs, shaking them to the sound of Julian’s laughter.

“That’s exactly what I thought. A stupid, absurd, fairy story.”

“No, not stupid!” Noel clambers to his feet, stomping them against pins and needles as the blood rushes back into them. “ _Amazing_. You get to see time properly, all wound up in tangles and wobbling, or squashed like someone’s sat on it a bit. I wish I could do that. Instead it’s always breakfast and school dinners, tea and telly and sleep. Mr Richards and those awful books on Newton, and time being linear. It’s not right, laying it all out in lines like that.”

Julian gets slowly to his feet as well, a smile creeping across his face as Noel speaks. “You still watch Doctor Who?”

He freezes. He’s been ridiculous again. “A bit,” he shrugs, trying to unstick his limbs, wondering if he’s blushing. That might be heat fanning out across his cheeks. _Honestly_ , he scolds his brain, _you moron. Going on like that about time_. 

It turns its back on him in a sulk. 

Noel realises with a start that Julian is still watching him with that bemused smile, and gropes for something to deflect his attention. “I like the older episodes better,” he murmurs. “Tom Baker’s scarf was wicked.”

“Ah, yes. Might’ve guessed you’d like that.”

“Why?”

“You... you’re fond of colours.” 

“You mean me in the future?”

“Both of you, I think.” Julian pauses, rubs a hand along his chin. “I remember a little boy who managed to use every single crayon from the Crayola Caddy in his Christmas drawing.”

Noel runs a hand through his hair self-consciously; he’s definitely blushing now. He ducks his head, looking desperately for where the football has got to. As he scans the ground, Julian’s answer catches at something in his mind. He glances up again, hoping that if the flare of red across his cheekbones hasn’t faded, it can at least be taken for the cold.

“Do you... do we know each other in the future? Are we friends?”

For some reason, it’s Julian who looks down this time. He starts shifting his weight again, one foot to the other, back and forth. 

“We are,” he says reluctantly. “But I can’t – I can’t tell you much. This thing, this curse, when it started, that was the one thing my father and grandfather kept insisting on. ‘Don’t interfere!’” He affects an old, crotchety voice complete with shaking fist. “‘Don’t tell yourself too much, or anyone else.’ I didn’t understand why back then, but... You learn it’s for the best.” He stops fidgeting, his face suddenly serious. “You have to learn that, too. You can’t tell me too much when I visit you. There’s no telling what I’ll know or not know until it’s too late. Promise me that, alright? I’ll answer whatever questions I can, and I’ll tell you when I can’t, but don’t mention something I’ve done or said unless you’re very, very sure of when I’m from.”

“Promise,” Noel swears. Julian’s words catch at him again, little glimmers amongst the stormy grey of that unexpected warning. “I promise,” he repeats, as a smile starts twitching the corners of his mouth.

“Good,” Julian replies, then cocks an eyebrow. “What?”

“You said _when_ you visit me. Does that mean I get to see you again?”

And now Julian’s grinning, shaking his head and tutting to himself, but grinning wide like Noel’s done something he’s proud of. “Unbelievable. You don’t miss a trick.” He breathes a sigh, warm and familiar. “Yes, you’ll see me again. I guess I can tell you that much.”

It’s something about the way he’s smiling, the lines that crinkle the corners of his eyes, or the knowing that lurks behind their darkness. It sticks in Noel’s ribs and stirs below his belly button. He stares down at the grass again, suddenly burning despite the coldness of the morning, a surfeit of emotions he can’t even name much less untangle rippling through him. Thoughts go whirling through his mind, insisting that he shouldn’t, that this is wrong, not because of what he feels but because of who it is. It’s like having a crush on your uncle. 

“Hey.” Julian’s voice stops the babble in Noel’s head as sure as flicking off a light switch. “Hey, alright? I know it’s a lot to take in.”

His hand ghosts over Noel’s shoulder, impossibly gently. It’s familiar, easy. Like he’s done it a hundred times before.

“You’ve come back so many times,” Noel blurts, not at all the sentence he planned to start with. _Idiot_ , he thinks ferociously to himself. _Couldn’t manage a ‘Yeah, it is’ or ‘No, I’m fine’. Even “I don’t know” would have done!_

Julian seems to understand though. “I have,” he says, and Noel can’t help but continue after that.

“But I mean, to me. You said you go places more often if they’re important. Does that– I mean- ” It’s so plaintive he breaks off again, unable to finish.

“Are you important?” Julian supplies, so soft and kind that Noel thinks he could split apart right there. 

He forces himself to look up into Julian’s eyes. They’re more guarded now, but there’s a war behind them. He can’t believe he hasn’t noticed til now; it’s painful, brilliant, blinding. If he listens closely, he knows he’ll hear the sounds of battle, gears turning and swords clashing. Veritas and Pietas, those heaviest of goddesses, each tugging at Julian until they tear him in two.

Then he blinks, and it’s just gold and lightness looking back at him.

“You’ll have to wait and find out.”


	7. October 1984

_October, 1984: Julian is 21 and 16_  
\--

The room is so familiar that Julian doesn’t even need to call on his memory, much less rummage through it, to work out where or when he is; it hits him between the eyes as soon as he opens them. Navy blue quilt, corner desk, one pile of books on the top of the dresser and another at the end of the bed. The piles are decently sized and neat. Well, neat-ish. The bed is unmade, rumpled rugby kit strewn at the end of it.

GCSE year. 

A smaller version of himself sits at the desk, back to him and head bent as he scratches notes on a big white pad.

“You right, Bee?” he asks, trying to keep his voice soft so as not to startle the boy, but his head whips round like a shot anyway.

“Who - hey! Yeah, alright.” His surprise slides into easy familiarity. “When did you get here?”

“Just now.” Julian sidles into the room, sits at the end of the bed, pushing the discarded jersey to one side. “Whatcha working on? It’s GCSE’s, right?” 

“Nah, that was months ago. It’s October now, first term of A levels. I’m trying to work out whether to change any, the deadline is half-term. When are you from?”

“1989. First year of university, spring term.”

“Ooh.” His younger face lights up visibly. “What are you reading? Where do I go?”

Julian shakes his head, smiling. “Can’t say. You know that.”

“Aw, give over.”

“Sorry, Bee. Come on,” he adds, as the petulant frown he’s only recently realised he wore as a teenager begins creeping onto the boy’s face. “You know why. If I tell you we read chemistry, you’ll sit there and choose a full science program. If I say humanities, you’ll choose languages and history.”

“Yeah, but-”

Julian knows what’s going to follow that ‘but’. He remembers with painful clarity the endless theoretical discussions he’d had with his father and grandfather for the first several months after his sixteenth birthday, how he’d played devil’s advocate, twisting arguments in and under themselves, testing the swirling boundaries of time. 

_Yeah, but what if I only make a decision because I knew I’d already made it? Yeah, but if future-me told me change something now, does it actually change the future or does the future happen the way it does because I changed something in the past? Yeah, but would it unravel time if I went left when an older me had said to go right?_

It must have driven them mad. 

He holds up his hand, cutting his younger self off before he can get started. “You have to make your own choices,” he says with finality. “What are you settled on so far?”

The younger him huffs, and looks down at his notepad. “Well. English, obviously, and Maths. Dad says I have to do them. And definitely Latin.”

As Julian sits there and listens, more and more of this visit starts flooding back into his head. “Latin? You planning to be a lawyer?” he asks drily, shivering slightly as the memory of that sentence as he heard it three years ago echoes curiously ahead of him speaking it now.

“Not really. I just like it,” the boy replies, and then frowns. “What?”

Julian pauses, concentrating on the strange sensation of knowing exactly what’s going to happen as it happens. It’s rarely like this; usually the gaps in time are longer, the memories less distinct. “It’s – I remember this. Am remembering it, I mean, right now. It’s like a really long, really vivid déjà vu.”

“What, you know what I’m going to say?”

“Yeah.”

“And what you’re going to say? Before you say it, I mean.”

“More like as I say it. It’s like being fed lines through an ear piece. It’s really weird,” he grins.

“What if I said something super random?”

Julian shakes his head. “It doesn’t work that way. This isn’t mind reading, Bee, it’s memory. I know what we’ll both say because I was here the first time. Perisomnambulist,” he adds, right as his other self says it, and laughs at his open-mouthed shock.

“Woah.”

He laughs again. “I told you. Anyway, this was only a few years ago for me. It’s not that impressive.”

“I _have_ to try that some time.”

“You will. In three years time. Because I just did.”

The younger him gives a wolfy grin, the effect of which is interrupted by a cracking yawn. “Shit, sorry,” he apologises.

For the first time, Julian notices how obviously tired the boy sitting opposite him is. It had been worse during his A levels, he reflects; even he had realised that he looked perpetually exhausted or downright ill during those few months. But gazing at himself now, four years younger and infinitely more worn than he currently feels, he can appreciate how he must have appeared to an adult’s eye, and why so many of his teachers had drawn him aside after class during his senior years to ask if everything was alright at home. 

“S’alright. Don’t let mum hear you speaking like that, though.” He studies those black circles under his other’s eyes again, and can’t help himself. “Tell you what, eh – ease up on yourself sometimes. Over the next couple of years. You get a really good mark in Latin.”

“Thanks,” he says softly, marking a little star on his notepad. He smiles at Julian conspiratorially. “What else are you – we – doing?”

They spend a good few minutes chatting about the things that fill their days: what Julian is learning on the guitar in 1984, and how he can’t find time during the day to practice amongst the bustle of university life. How he’s been sneaking out at night, away from the noise and the parties, to a thick grove of trees by the edge of the lake, where he strums new melodies until his eyelids are drooping. The younger him probes at that, trying again to work out which university Julian is attending; Julian just laughs and tells him that there are at least fourteen he knows of with lakes on campus.

“Guess I’ll find out eventually,” he says with a resigned sigh.

“You will. Sooner than you think. For now, though,” Julian stands, motioning to the notepad scrawled with pencil markings, the pile of books by the end of the bed. “Make sure you get some sleep in amongst all this. You’ll need it.”

It’s not much of a warning for what the next two years will hold. It might not have had any effect anyway; it’s hard to tell now whether the classes he skipped or napped through in his senior years are the result of him saying something today, or were simply the natural state of a stressed, exhausted teenager. But it felt right. And being able to breeze through his final Latin exam knowing he had nothing to worry about had been the one bright spot in an otherwise awful month last year. For that, it was absolutely worth flexing the rules a bit.

“Yeah, but-” is the last thing Julian hears as the familiar vacuum pull takes hold, tugging him back to his correct time and place, and he laughs quietly to himself as 1984 melts away.


	8. July 1995

  _July, 1995: Julian is 27  
\--_

 

There had been a point when everything had started to feel like it was coalescing into a sensible, almost plausible, whole. Julian’s not sure when exactly; somewhere in the vague past, a few years ago, after he’d given up on American Studies.

Leaving Reading had been the only choice in the end. Trying to squeeze assessments and final exams into a personal schedule that gave you only the briefest of warnings that you might be otherwise engaged on a particular date was, at best, too much effort, and disastrous more often than not. And in any case, the most useful part of his degree had turned out to be the access it afforded to the university library. Julian still regrets having to leave that behind; it had been surprisingly helpful for researching his family curse (words which no longer feel _quite_ as ridiculous as they once did), and the Special Collections had held an enormous quantity of materials relating to the Romani for some reason. Whole afternoons had wandered by as he pawed over the crumbling, brown-leaved tomes, stopping every so often to note a helpful reference in his grandfather’s diary.

He’d begun to elaborate on his ancestor’s words, recording his own experiences of slipping back and forth in time in the blank pages that followed his father’s notes. The rules he’d begun to learn during high school had made themselves clearer as he went. Only points during his own lifetime, like his dad and grandad had said. Rarely the future, which he had supposed made sense: if you were cursing someone ‘good and proper’, you wouldn’t want to give them too many clues about how they might break it. The more often he’d visit a place, the more important it was, and the more important a person is to him, the more often he’ll drop in on them. Once the whirlwind of his early trips had settled, his slips had fallen into a pattern of navigating to himself, his family, or – occasionally – to helpful strangers, like the guys who had mistaken him for a student after one of his early stand-up sessions and introduced him to Dave Brown over a pint of beer.

_That_ had been a true blessing. Dave has some odd friends: Julian’s still slightly embarrassed about barging in on that poor kid in the art rooms. Noel hadn’t seemed to mind too much when he met him properly a few weeks later, he’d just grinned like a maniac and breathed how brilliant Julian’s set was – which was a lie but a well-meant one Julian supposes. But Dave Brown’s poster art skills were legendary amongst the art students. They’re certainly well beyond anything Julian himself possesses and here, amongst the psychedelic flyers and banners declaiming the rest of the Fringe season, they’re holding their own with dignity.

There had been a point where everything had started to made a semblance of sense. Right now, however, with a sticky wet t-shirt and the stench of beer clinging to him, Julian’s finding it very difficult to see any sense in his life at all.

He tugs the shirt over his head as soon as he’s off-stage, laughter and applause still trailing in behind him. His jacket is where he left it, in a slightly crumpled pile on a chair by the props table; he silently thanks himself for shrugging it off before he went out there. Wiping himself down with the dry parts of his shirt as best he can, Julian slips on the jacket, and slumps down into the chair, pinching the bridge of his nose tiredly.

_Fine thing_ , he thinks, _knowing_. He’s been warned any number of times about the perils of _telling_ himself too much, his father and grandfather hammering the point home with awkward examples of their own past mistakes. But neither of them have warned him about the dangers of simply _knowing_.

It had only been a couple of hours. He’d been sitting in a dark, back corner of the pub, beer in hand, mentally reciting, rewriting, rearranging lines of his act to suit the night. These late-late sets – death slots, he calls them, usually with a dry deadpan – were actually alright. Better than opening before the headliner: by midnight most everyone was drunk, tired, or both, and his frenetic blend of sound, stammers, and movement went over quite well. People had even started laughing at the skin suit joke. He’d been looking down at his beer, pondering whether to lead into it with supersonic comedy or tribal fusion, when he’d had the curious sense that he was falling into the amber bubbles in his glass. He’d looked up to find himself looking at – himself.

In amongst learning the rules of his curse over the years, Julian’s discovered that he can usually count on small mercies. This time he’d ended up right at the back of the admittedly small, but thankfully also very dark, theatre. His biggest worry should have been another audience member turning and recognising him. But after a few moments of laughter and applause at the end of a skit, there had been a blur of motion down in front. Julian had squinted through the dark to see what the fuss was about, and had proceeded to watch, stupified, as a cup arced in slow motion through the air, liquid rising up and over its sides, raining droplets onto the stage, until the man holding the microphone and wearing his face had turned and the cup had collided with his chest, showering him in what he now knows was thick, dark ale.

Only that wasn’t _quite_ how it had happened.

Julian winces as he contrasts the event he’s just lived through to the memory of having watched it from a distance two hours previously. He’d had another beer when he slipped back to the pub, a mere four minutes after he’d left it if his watch was to be believed. He’d settled on the supersonic comedy skit; it was faster and left him more time to draw out the Tube story, which seemed to work better if he threw in as much as possible before dropping the leisure suit line. He’d walked out on stage to polite applause, hitting fast and hard – _I’m a beam, I’m a ray, I’m like lightning coming atcha in the night like a buzzard_ – watching the bemused grins of the audience as they’d tried to follow his bullet-fast words. They’d been quite good, scattering woops and cheers, throwing their heads back in laughter as he got deeper and deeper into the routine.

He made it as far as the _shusha_. As he darted from side to side, hands held up for silence, _shusha!_ , there’d been a clamour to his left. Three rows back, a man with chubby fingers clutched tightly around a plastic cup, his red cheeks and slightly glazed eyes the testament to a very decent night out. “Shoosha,” he’d shouted back, laughing uproariously at his own wit. Julian had responded on autopilot.

“Shusha, my friend.”

“I’ll gi’ ye shoosha,” the man had flung back at him, wheezing his hilarity.

As he’d raised his arm, panicked images had flooded Julian’s mind. The cup, flying in a graceful arc. Its contents, pushed up by centrifugal force, spilling out over the rim like a tiny flying volcano. Without giving his brain time to consider, his body hand lunged left in an effort to avoid the unavoidable. Like a magnet, the movement had driven him right into the damn thing’s orbit and set the audience ringing with peals of laughter and spontaneous applause.

Julian had stared at the cup by his feet for a long, dizzy moment. Then he’d looked back up at the audience catching their breath, wiping tears from their eyes, and delivered one final line.

“Right, then. Exit, pursued by a beer.”

As finales go, it isn’t the worst he’s had. Far from it: at least the entire audience had been applauding this time. But it’s slightly galling to know that one of his best sets to date is the result of nothing more sophisticated than a rogue beer; that the hours of drafting and editing, of re-editing, of spitting words at himself in front of a mirror to get his tics and blinks at just the right level of madness and enchantment, can be so easily overshadowed.

The remaining ale smeared across his chest is becoming stickier by the minute. Sighing heavily, Julian buttons his jacket as best he can and heads for home. If nothing else, he now has a parable to rival the most embarrassing of his dad’s or grandad’s.

The next day, over coffee, he spots a tiny passage at the bottom of the opening night reviews, calling his act a tour de force, “a delicate blend of whimsy and control… a consummate wordsmith, even when things go as obviously awry as they did last evening.”

Julian smiles to himself, closing the paper. Maybe he’s misjudged, he thinks.

Maybe there’s some small sense in all this after all.


	9. November 1994

_November, 1994: Noel is 21, Julian is 26  
\--_

“Where’s Dave?”

The voice bursts roughly into his silent workspace, punctuated by the thud of the double wooden doors against their stoppers. Noel spins from his work, paintbrush still in hand, to find the owner of the voice glaring at him from the doorway; a boy about his own age dressed in a red turtleneck and mustard trousers. He’s tall, skinny, and looks exhausted. 

Noel has no idea what he’s talking about.

“What?”

“Has he gone already? Fuck, I was meant to meet him here, he’s doing my flyers. What’s the time?”

The words come rapid-fire in a harried Northern accent, so quickly that Noel has to pause to untangle them before he can answer.

“Er... I dunno.” He sticks his free left hand up in the air, wriggling his fingers a bit for effect. “Ain’t got a watch.”

“Where’d he go then?”

“Who?”

“Dave.” The boy glares at him, the exasperation in his voice made menacing by furrowed brows and dangerously narrowed eyes that insinuate Noel’s being vague on purpose.

“Dave Brown? I dunno,” Noel says again. “Ain’t seen him since lunch. Been in here by myself all afternoon. You sure it was here? He never said nothing about it.”

“ _Yes_.” His hand runs distractedly through already messy hair, leaving it even more chaotic. “I’ve not got time for this, the bloody show’s on this Friday. If you see him, tell him I’m in the union building.”

He’s turned on his heel and stalked off before Noel can ask who he actually is.

Noel shakes his head, re-coats his brush, and loses himself again to the tri-colour jungle blossoming across his canvas.

He never means to forget but the boy in the turtleneck gets lost, like so many other messages, under ideas and stories and the threat of assignment deadlines. He creeps back into Noel’s head three weeks later, just before the end of term, when Dave comes home in a whirlwind of pencils and sketches. He dumps his bag on the sofa and the textbooks that litter their little table on the floor, and almost throws himself into the chair. His hand immediately starts sketching frantic lines across an A3 page. 

Noel leaves his tea steeping by the sink and wanders across the room to peer over Dave’s shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“Poster. S’for this comedian. I said I’d do them a fortnight ago but we had that portfolio due, and I forgot. He just about tore me a new one.”

“Mental, then?”

“Nah. Stressed I think. Only got three days til the show.” He reaches for a heavier pencil. “You’d like him, actually. He’s bizarre.”

A frazzled, messy-haired face knocks on the edge of Noel’s memory, mouthing _the bloody show’s on this Friday_. “What’s his name?”

“Julian something-or-other.” Dave turns from his work to look up at him. “Me and Nige are going, you wanna come? You’ll love it, he’s dead weird. Right up your alley.”

 _Julian_.

Noel smiles to himself as his imagination adds a two decades, a moustache, and laughter lines to the skinny boy from the art room, turning him slowly into the man who stood by his side on a freezing football pitch six years ago. 

“Yeah,” he says, and slips away from Dave’s side to reclaim his cup of tea. The future is finally catching up to the now. “Why not?”


	10. November 1994

_November, 1994: Julian is 26, Noel is 21  
\--_

When Julian opens his eyes, his headache is all but gone and his surroundings are blessedly quiet. He sits up, blinking tiredly at the branches over his head. It looks like the tree he sat under before the blackness claimed him. He’s suddenly not sure that he’s travelled at all.

He glances left, then right. There’s no one about, but then, that’s the point; you find somewhere quiet, somewhere you’re unlikely to draw much attention. The gnarly old birch at his back isn’t as isolated as the riverside grove at Reading was, but it’s halfway down an embankment and so removed from the main buildings that even the most paranoid of students probably wouldn’t venture this far with their joint. In all the hours he’s spent scouring the corners of this campus, this is the only place he’s never encountered another person. If he’s going to slip, here is the best place to do it.

Julian drags himself to his feet, glancing around again just in case, but it’s definitely the same tree. He squints up into the sky. The sun is still high above his head. The traffic is still whooshing along the A40 behind the screen of oak and laurel. There’s nothing to indicate that time has shifted. 

Just a kip, then. A desperately needed one, if the headache was anything to go by. He stretches, mild satisfaction seeping through him with every pop and crackle of his joints. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between travel and tiredness. He’d hoped he’d past the worst of it once things evened off that first year at Reading, but each successive fall in or out of time has once again started leaving him drained, mentally and physically. No amount of sleep seems to help. His father swears the same thing happened to him, several times, and to Julian’s grandfather, that it will stop eventually. It’s reassuring, inasmuch as anything can be when you’re constantly playing leapfrog between the days of your own history, but it’s not exactly helpful when you’re falling asleep head-first into a bowl of cereal.

Today had been especially bad. Julian grimaces, wondering how many times he yawned in the middle of that meeting and if-

He practically feels his thoughts collide, the whole motley lot crashing into the word _meeting_ with the force of a speeding lorry. He scrambles up the bank, biting back a string of fucks as he goes, racing along the little gravel path and across the campus as quickly as he can without looking like a tit. With any luck, people will assume he’s just another student late for classes; God knows he’s been mistaken for one often enough.

The design building is all but empty. He vaults the stairs to the upper studios two at a time, heedlessly navigating the corridors until he finds the room they agreed on as a meeting place. Chest heaving, he leans against the door frame for a moment, trying to catch his breath. With any luck, he won’t be terribly late.

There are glass panels set into the studio doors. Julian peers in on instinct; he can generally tell how late he is by how royally fucked off someone looks, and painful experience has taught him that it’s always best to be prepared. There’s a scruffy blonde head in his eye line, sure enough, but not the one he expects to see. This one’s attached to a skinny kid in flares with hips like a girl and a paintbrush tucked behind one ear.

He’s properly late then.

 _Fuck everything_ , he thinks, and shoves the double doors open. “Where’s Dave?”


	11. August 2001

_August, 2001: Noel is 28, Julian is 42  
\--_

Noel is sitting sideways on the wide strip of window ledge when he hears it, his legs tucked up against his chest, his heels resting amid the pots of herbs and snapdragons. It’s the softest rustle, barely a sound at all: the memory of wind playing in the tops of his nan’s oak trees; the faint, sharp hiss of an indrawn breath. There is an almost imperceptible change in the air around him, the pressure shifting ever so slightly as it hurriedly rearranges itself to accommodate a second solid body in the space where there was formerly only one.

Noel lets his head tilt slightly to rest against the now-warm panes of glass. Behind him, a hushed footstep falls, followed by another. He speaks to them without turning his head.

“Hey, Ju.”

The steps come a little more heavily at his greeting, pausing after a moment or two. Noel glances up through his eyelashes. Julian’s face is hanging in the air above him like a moon.

“How’d you know it was me? Did I tell you something?”

“Nah, just had a feeling. The sky is the right colour for it.” He grins his favourite grin, the one he practices sometimes to flash at their more harrowing audiences, equal parts Cheshire Cat and chess master. “Besides, no one else is gonna show up in the middle of my flat on a Sunday afternoon.”

“Fair deuce.” Julian answers his grin with a rueful one of his own, moving down to the other end of the window ledge and gently pushing a pot of sage aside. He perches awkwardly. Noel returns his gaze to the street below. “What you looking at?”

“You.”

Julian bolts upright immediately, almost knocking over the sage as he does so and two tall pots of snapdragons besides. The flowers tremble in his wake, their brimfuls of pink and yellow flowers quivering indignantly. He hasn’t noticed though; he’s leaning over the top of them, both hands and his face planted against the window.

“Where? Coming or going?”

Noel laughs, untucking his legs and swinging them down off the side of the window ledge so that his sock-covered toes brush against the floorboards. He ghosts a soothing hand over the top of the pink snapdragon, which is still bristling at its upset. The pinks are always a bit temperamental. 

“Going, you berk. Obviously.” The flower calms under his touch. Noel twists around to look out the window again, following the movement of Julian’s head, back and forth as he searches for himself. “Down there?” he says, tapping the glass with a fingertip.

Julian’s eyes dart in the direction he points, narrow like a mole’s. He stays like that for a moment, squinting and frowning, until he finally gives a short, sharp nod. The now-Julian – although this one beside him is the now-Julian too, Noel realises, tangling himself up as he tries to fit words into time – the five-minutes-ago-Julian, the Julian who lives here in this flat, rounds a corner and disappears from view.

“You’re the berk,” Julian mutters, stepping back from the window. The tip of his nose has gone red from the pressure of being squashed up against it. “You might warn a person.”

Noel shrugs. “What for? Nothin’ to warn you about. Anyway, you’ve met yourself before. You told me.”

“That’s different,” Julian sniffs. “That was just us. Me. There wasn’t...” He takes a measured breath. “It’s hard enough to know what I should say to myself sometimes. If you’re there too, I can’t be sure one of us won’t give too much away.”

“Give what away?”

“Anything. Nothing.”

“Did something happen?” He shouldn’t tease, he knows, but Julian is surprisingly easy to ruffle today. He’s started squirming where he stands, one step left, another right, a few tiny moments away from full-blown pacing. “Did we break up? Buy a house? Ooh, did we get an otter?”

“Noel.” Julian’s restless movement stops as suddenly as it started. He pinches the bridge of his nose, taking another long breath. “I can’t say. You know I can’t.”

Noel slips down from the ledge to stand in front of his – well, future his – boyfriend. Hands on his hips, head cocked, his eyes roam Julian for a long minute before he relents. 

“Sorry, Ju.” And he is, but he knows he doesn’t quite sound it; contrition never seems to make it into his mouth properly. It must still be up there, hidden amongst the drifting thoughts and winding little pathways of his mind. Maybe it will work its way loose another time, Noel thinks, somewhere wholly irrelevant. Maybe one night at dinner he’ll apologetically order a mournful pasta.

“S’fine,” Julian has mumbled, not unkindly, before falling silent. His eyes are gazing at the pots of herbs and flowers on the ledge behind them, but Noel knows he’s not seeing them, not yet. “Where’d I go?” he asks finally.

“Bookshop.”

“Bookshop?” Julian’s head whips round, his gaze more critical now, sweeping the room. “ _Bookshop_? But there’s - ” he breaks off for a moment, his eyes darting beadily from bookcase to bookcase, “there’s about four hundred books crammed in here.”

Noel laughs under his breath, wandering over to the armchair the other Julian vacated ten minutes prior. He flops down into it sideways, legs dangling over one arm, and picks up the book that has been left folded open face-down on the coffee table. “That’s exactly what you said. ‘There’s four hundred sodding books in here, and I don’t want to read any of them.’”

“What’s that one?”

“ _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_. Aww, come off it, don’t make that face. It was a genius choice earlier when them thunderclouds were out all over. Proper grim.”

Julian strides over and plucks the book from his fingers, leafing back through its open pages towards the start. “‘She was a fine and handsome girl’,” he reads aloud, then interrupts himself, just as he’d done before he’d proclaimed the book a hopeless cause and stalked off to the bookshop. “They’re always fine and handsome, aren’t they, Victorian ladies? Or they have _qualities_. Where’s your everyday dozy mare with a face like a shoe and the personality of a tanned hide, that’s what I want to know.”

This is a different line of argument to earlier. Noel sits up, intrigued, one eye closing of its own accord as he ponders this Julian’s thought processes. He can feel his eyelashes on his cheek. In a shadowy corner of his mind, a little voice begins wondering whether he ought to get an eyepatch. He hushes it away until later. 

“Mary, from _Pride and Prejudice_ ,” he says at length. “She was a right bore.”

“She was Georgian, not Victorian.” Julian starts to wander a slow circle around Noel, clearing his throat as he resumes reading. “‘She was a fine and handsome girl but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape.’ Christ.” He makes his way over to the armchair opposite Noel’s, and drops the book, closed this time, back onto the coffee table. 

“I still haven’t read this,” he says as he sits. “Not sure I want to now.”

“So don’t.” Noel replies, stretching lazily, then pauses mid-flex. “Am I allowed to say that? I mean, if you haven’t read it in – when are you from?”

“2010.”

“Ooh, did we get rid of Tony Blair yet?”

“Noel.”

Noel grins at the face scowling in the opposite chair. The warning in Julian’s voice is all play; his apology is returned in kind. “Alright, cool your boots. What I mean is, in _nine_ years, you haven’t wanted to read it. So I can tell you not to, right? I mean, you’re pretty much already decided. I’m not changing your future at all.”

“I would say that’s a fairly safe assumption.”

“Good.” 

Noel pushes his toes through the last few inches of his stretch until they’re fully extended, feeling the yellow-orange blush of tension creep up his limbs. If he holds the position longer it will turn to red, then to violent magenta. But today no longer a day for magenta. The sun is dancing over the windows in plies and arabesques, all pale golden pastels. He exhales, letting his breath go dancing with the dust motes as the tangerine strain in his calves fades slowly back to lemon. 

“Tell me what’s new,” he says finally, when he has breathed out the last of the colours inside him. “Not in detail,” he adds quickly, noticing the way Julian’s frown grows. “Just... generally. How are you in 2010?”

“Tired.”

He laughs, short and sharp. “You always say that. If I’d started taking notes all them years ago, I’d have your life history written out in snores.”

“And a fascinating history it would be too,” Julian retorts. “You try traipsing through a dozen people’s timelines every second night – you’d be tired too. Worse.” A grin works its way onto his face. “I’ve seen you after a late night, you’re hopeless in the mornings.”

“I know, I’m useless. I’d get two trips in and have to lie down for a year.” Noel laughs again at the thought of that, himself as a time-traveller, trying to find his way back through the tangled strings of seconds and hours to where he’d left from. “I’d be a disaster.”

“Of the highest order.”

“Good job it’s you, then, innit.” He waits for a moment. Julian’s eyes have started to drift across the room again, properly looking this time. “You’re okay, though?” he asks finally. “You’re happy?”

This time it’s Julian who stops, his face half-turned towards the window. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, I am.”

He stands then, wandering back to the window ledge. Noel sits, not waiting anymore, just _being_ as Julian drifts up and back along the length of the window, his index finger trailing along the ledge, his eyes on the pots that line it. _Now_ , he knows. Now he’s seeing them.

“I remember these,” Julian says softly, more to himself than to Noel. “From when we lived here. I remember how long it took you to get those bloody snapdragons to grow.”

“Look alright now though.”

“They look incredible now. So bright.” A short burst of air, half-huff, half-chuckle, escapes him. “Hard for them not to be when they’ve got you to compete with.”

Julian turns a slow circle, his gaze moving from the potted plants on the ledge to the kitchen, where Noel’s brushes are soaking in an old jam jar, to the sheets of painted fabric that he’s tacked up to dry on the clothes airer, and finally back to the four battered bookcases that line the sitting room walls.

“I loved this flat,” he says gently, as though the sentence is a secret that will break in his mouth if he doesn’t shape it with care. 

His words hang in the air, gleaming like jewels in the silence that follows them. Normally Noel would try to fill it. Normally silences are thorny devils that he spends half his life trying to shoo away. This one is different though, precisely cut and shaped. This one should be here. 

Julian walks back to settle once more in the chair opposite him and they sit there for minutes, half a dozen, a dozen or more. They breathe the silence in and out. Their lungs are a crucible, an alchemist’s cauldron. They add heat; they shine and they polish until the metamorphosis is complete, and the silence has become a calm, embracing them, enshrouding them. It’s the prelude to a storm; it has that same pregnant quality pulsing through it, that quirk of reflected, oily light.

“How long since you’ve seen me?” Julian asks eventually, his words tumbling heavily into the blanket of quiet.

“Not that long?”

“There... might be some longer patches coming up.”

“Should you be telling me that?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs, spreading his hands in a gesture that makes him look very much like his father. “I just wanted you to know. Be patient. It’ll work out.”

Little ripples of unrest have begun spreading out in rings from Julian’s lips. Noel’s question from earlier runs repeating itself through mirrors in his head: _Did something happen? Did something happen?_ He draws a slow breath. The calm can’t hold forever; even he knows that all storms break eventually. But this one hasn’t broken yet. Julian is buying books, and Julian is here, and somewhere – five minutes ago, ten years from now – Julian is with him.

“I know,” he says simply, and just like that, as if he controls the tides, the ripples stop. The viscous, oily quality dissipates until the light streaming through the window is once more pure gold and buttercups. Two dust motes are chasing one another through the air next to Julian’s left ear. Noel watches them, counting off the seconds before he speaks again. _Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen _.__

__“Can I ask you something?”_ _

__“Always.”_ _

__“Can you – will you leave before you have to, this time? I get it, honest, that you can’t help it. I know that. It’s just, you’re always there and then you’re... not. You’re vanished. Like you never existed, like I made you up, every time. So could you maybe – this time, could you just leave when it’s time? Just once, y’know, like you’re popping out for a bit. Like we’re normal.”_ _

__It’s more words than he meant to say, all clambering out on top of one another in a heap, but Julian seems to understand. He pushes up from the chair again and crosses to Noel, cupping his cheek with one hand, smiling down at him._ _

__“You’d hate being normal,” he says, leaning down to kiss him._ _

__“Yeah,” Noel murmurs against his lips. “It’d be rubbish.”_ _

__“It’s almost time now, anyway.” Julian straightens, skimming a glance over the window ledge once more. “I guess I’ll see you in a bit, then. Look after the plants, won’t you?”_ _

__“One of us has got to,” Noel answers with a grin, and then adds, more softly, “Bye Ju.”_ _

__“See you.”_ _

__Noel waits until he’s heard the soft click of the door lock catching, then pads softly back over to the window ledge. He picks his spot in the afternoon sun like a cat, levering himself down amongst the greenery. He settles with his knees slightly raised, his feet nestled back between the snapdragons. Tipping his head against the window, he looks down towards the corner and waits for Julian to come home._ _


	12. May 1999

_May, 1999: Julian is 30 and 16, Noel is 25_  
\--

The familiar clunk of the old wooden door’s lock rumbles down the hallway, causing the boy in front of him to jump slightly. Julian groans inwardly. Of course Noel’s going to come home now. _Of course_ he is.

“Perfect bloody timing,” he mumbles under his breath as he gets to his feet. His younger self’s fingers are clutching the mug handle so tightly they’re turning white, and he’s looking around with a stricken face. A faint, fifteen year old memory stirs at the bottom of Julian’s mind. He’d been panicking about the tea, hadn’t he? Of all the things that birthday threw at him, his ridiculous brain had been most worried about spilling tea on someone’s bedsheets.

“It’s alright,” he says gently. “Don’t worry about it. Just wait here a sec, yeah?”

The boy nods hesitantly, and Julian darts out into the hallway before Noel has the chance to come into the bedroom. The last thing a sixteen year old fledgling time-traveller needs is an advance screening of the glittery whirlwind his future’s going to revolve around.

The whirlwind in question is pulling off his boots. He glances up as Julian makes his way down the hall, face splitting into a wide, daft grin. Dropping the shoe, he slides two paces in his socks to wrap his arms tightly around Julian’s middle and press a kiss to the underside of his jaw. “Missed you,” he purrs, nuzzling against the crook of his shoulder.

“I m- oh. Oh, _shit_ , I remember that.”

“What?”

Julian pulls back, holding Noel at arm’s length. “I remember you saying that. From... I was here, just now. A younger me, I mean.” 

“Really? Where are you?” Noel’s eyes are glimmering with excitement. Julian breathes a deep sigh and screws his own eyes shut, his fingers pinching absently at the bridge of his nose.

“Gone. I slipped back home just after you came in.”

“Oh. So what, then?

“So _what_?” He opens his eyes to stare dead into Noel’s. “This changes everything, that’s what. It means that I heard you, ages before I ever should have, and maybe – what if I remembered? What if that night, when you spoke to me at Bucks, what if I only listened because I recognised your voice?”

“Ju, I said two words.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“No, but no one remembers two words. Especially not from – when were you here from?”

“1984.”

Noel laughs, head tipped back to the ceiling, the sound bouncing off the walls and filling Julian’s ears. “That’s like twelve years ago!”

“Fifteen, you berk.”

“ _No one_ remembers two words from fifteen years ago. Not even you, you freak.” He tucks a cold hand into Julian’s and tugs on his arm, pulling him towards the front room. “Come on, forget that. Tell me about little you. Why were you here?”

“Why am I ever anywhere?” Julian sinks heavily onto the settee, letting his eyes close again and his head tip back for a moment. He feels the cushions sink as Noel settles in beside him. “It was the first time,” he says finally. “My sixteenth birthday. What a gift.”

“That was when you got the book, wasn’t it?”

Julian nods. It’s still vaguely amusing how much power that diary has over Noel. The first time he’d tried to explain all this to him, Noel had been more fascinated by the aging book – “It’s _hand-bound_!” – than he had by the fact that his newly-official boyfriend could travel in time. He’d murmured a breathy, distracted ‘genius’ at the close of Julian’s confession, plucked the diary from Julian’s hands and leafed delicately through its brittle pages for an hour and a half. 

“And the hourglass,” Julian continues. “Dad and grandad sat me down after tea and... I don’t think I really believed them, not until it happened. They both looked so serious, but I remember going to bed thinking they’d follow me up and yell ‘surprise’ or something. Instead I fell asleep and woke up in our bedroom.”

Noel’s face morphs from amusement to the most scandalised expression Julian’s ever seen. “You knew you’d be here tonight and you let me go out anyway?!”

“What? No, don’t be ridiculous. I was half-asleep and about to be sick when I got here, I didn’t know what fucking day I was in. I only realised it was me tonight when I heard someone thumping about in there. With you out, there weren’t many other options.”

Noel huffs and tuts, and tips his head to one side like he’s considering how plausible an excuse that should be deemed. After a moment he nods, but his brows crease back into a frown almost immediately. “Wait on, if you – little you – thought your dad was tricking you, how’d you know it was _you_ you were talking to tonight?”

“I told him my nickname. The one only mum used.”

“Ooh.”

“No.”

“Aww, go on. I won’t laugh. And I won’t tell no one. Cross my heart.”

Julian raises an eyebrow, but Noel’s looking at him with that half-pleading, half-stubborn look he uses to make him buy sweets instead of greens and watch cartoons instead of documentaries. He shakes his head, already regretting the words his lips are forming. “Bee. The letter, not the insect. Like B for Barratt?” 

Noel tips his head to one side again, closing one eye and scrunching up his nose as he studies him. “I like Ju better.”

“Thank Christ for that.”

He grins and scuffles closer, slipping his hand up into the crook of Julian’s elbow. “What’d you talk about?”

Julian shrugs. “Not much, really. The book and the hourglass, obviously. What to expect, what you can and can’t tell people. What you can and can’t tell _yourself_. I think that was the point I really started to believe it. Which makes no sense, really. It should’ve been weird, listening to myself, and I never said anything that dad and grandad hadn’t told me but it just seemed... right. And I made him tea. I remember – God, I remember it tasted amazing. It was the first time anyone other than mum had made it for me, and she always put sugar and too much milk in. I never even thought of that until tonight: I literally taught myself how I like my tea.” He conjures up the image of his younger self’s face, his tentative, polite sips giving way to wide-eyed surprise that tea wasn’t something to suffer through for company’s sake. 

“Wish I could’ve seen you,” Noel says wistfully. “I bet you were adorable.”

“I wasn’t. I was too tall and too skinny.”

“Kinda like now, then?” He pokes Julian in the ribs. 

“Piss off. I’m lean and muscular.”

“You’re a string bean. But you’re my string bean, and I love you.”

“No accounting for taste.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Noel unfurls himself and bounces to his feet. “D’you want one of them teas you love so much then? I’m dying for one.”

“Yeah, go on.”

Julian relaxes into the settee as the muted clinks of spoons and saucers drift around his ears. His mind replays fragments of the evening; out of order, just like his life, immediate experience tinged with the odd colours of childhood recollection. He sends a wan smile in the direction of 1984. It would be nice to think his younger self wasn’t feeling too poorly right now, he muses. Unfortunately, he remembers all too well the splitting headache he woke up to the following day.


	13. July 2001

_July, 2001: Julian is 33, Noel is 28 and 5  
\--_

“ _Ow_.”

It’s one of those awful arrivals where everything is shrouded in black and red, and there’s a hard _something_ immediately in front of his nose, shin or – in this case – toe. The exclamation escapes his mouth before Julian can stop it. He manages to turn it into a loud whisper instead of an audible yelp, but it’s unwanted noise all the same, and he curses inwardly as he pulls his injured foot up to rub at it. 

He’s standing in front of an open doorway, the edge of which is what his toe has just collided with. There’s a puddle of lamp-light spilling out around him but the world is still swimming, and he blinks owlishly trying to clear his vision. The softly-lit room starts to come into focus: a single bed with a bright yellow duvet, the edge of a bookcase, a plastic crate full of toys. None of it’s familiar.

The skinny blonde boy who suddenly appears in front of him confirms it: he has less than no idea whose house he’s in.

“Hello!” 

The word hangs in the air, as bright as the boy’s smile. Julian’s mouth turns to sawdust. The eyes staring up at him are huge and blue, so he’s definitely not visiting himself. His son, then? He’s tried as hard as he can to ignore the inevitability that he’ll have one, one day, but perhaps this is it; his cursed future come to greet him as nonchalantly as only a three-foot tall child in oversized pyjamas can. 

He realises he’s still got one foot in the air and lowers it gently back to the ground. Before he can think of anything to say, the tiny creature in front of him has stuck out a hand, shoulders pushed back like he’s meeting the Queen. 

“I’m Noel.” 

Julian just about faints with relief. “Thank Christ,” he whispers to himself, and steps into the room.

There’s something profoundly strange about talking to this tiny version of the man he’s spent so many hours with. Julian responds to Noel’s questions automatically, only dimly aware of what he’s saying, for a good few minutes before he realises what’s bothering him: the boy is familiar. It’s not that he’s recognising the childish features for what they’ll grow into. He’s seen this face, at this age, before. 

Except he’s pretty sure he’s never seen pictures of Noel as a child.

He racks his brain as Noel’s smaller self trots over to the bookcase in the corner. Maybe he has seen something, somewhere; at Noel’s parents, perhaps. But he knows that for a lie even as he thinks it. Noel’s mum keeps her photos in albums and the only time she ever tried to get one out, Noel squealed and squawked until she put it back, unopened. 

The little form pads back across the room to his side, clutching a piece of paper in his hands. 

“Can I sit on here?” Julian asks, gesturing to the end of the little bed. Noel nods, and Julian does. At this height it’s easier to see the child’s face, and he studies him, thoughts tumbling wearily through in his head. Maybe he’s wrong after all. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, an imperfect memory, exhaustion convincing him recognition is familiarity. Now that his head’s properly unfogged, it’s obvious that no one could look at this boy and not recognise him for Noel. There’s the flat outline of his nose, the slight overlap of his front teeth. It’s a face Julian knows almost as well, or maybe better, than his own. A face he’s seen in wakefulness and sleep, crowned with delight, sorrow, frustration. 

Noel offers out the paper he’s clutching with chubby hands and a frown of uncertainty, and yes, even that’s familiar; he wears that look every time he unwraps one of his gossamer ideas for new eyes. But something else stirs in Julian’s memory as he takes the page, another flash of disquieting déja vu. Those eyes, wide and blue, fixed on him from the inside of a sweets shop window. A slightly older child peering down from the roof of a shed with a grey tabby cat perched beside him. And Noel, his Noel, his eyes wide as saucers, frantically shoving his mother’s photo albums away. Four Christmases, countless weekend roasts and cups of tea together, and not a single childhood photograph ever crossed his path. Nothing to connect the pixie with the feather cut and girly clothes who shares his bed to the little blonde face dotted throughout his history.

That’s not a trick of the light. He knew. Noel fucking Fielding has known him his entire life.

“Did you do this?” he asks, careful to keep his voice light. This is a child, after all, not his bastard boyfriend.

Noel nods. “At school today.”

“I see.” Julian trains his gaze on the picture, a stylised bird outlined in black crayon. He lets his eyes sweep along the thick curves of its wings, wondering idly why Noel still has so much self-doubt. Even as a child his talent was blindingly obvious. He glances back to the tiny figure at his side; those huge blue orbs are fixed on him, clearly anticipating the worst. Julian smiles in reassurance. “It’s very good.”

Noel beams. “I did others. My teacher said I could be an artist.”

“So you liked school, then?”

The excitement vanishes instantly. “It’s okay,” Noel says, brows drawn. Julian waits, knowing he’s not finished, and after a minute Noel adds, “I liked drawing. But I don’t wanna go back.”

“Why not?” Julian asks, pitching his voice low. It’s the same soothing tone he uses whenever Noel’s upset at home, and it works just as well. The little nose wrinkles up and Julian finds himself holding his breath as a five year old tries to find words for emotions he shouldn’t have to feel yet. They’re small enough in the telling – unfamiliar people, different dinners. Tiny things standing in for the enormity of it all; a perfect, pure distillation of all Noel’s shyness and loneliness, and the insecurities he’s gotten so good at hiding. This face might be younger and rounder, but the anxiety in his eyes is so perfectly identical that the last remnants of Julian’s anger melt away entirely.

It’s a quick trip, as standards go, barely ten minutes before the warning pains are bashing through Julian’s head. He studies this small Noel once more as he helps him back into his bed, overwhelmed with the urge to give him a hug and promise him that he won’t always be lonely or feel out of place. He settles for tucking him in, smoothing the blanket down over his skinny ribs.

“Goodnight, Noel,” he whispers from the doorway. The last thing he hears is a bright ‘goodnight’ in return as his world swirls into black.

The spinning eases almost as quickly as it began, and Julian steps into his own sitting room with five year old Noel’s farewell still ringing in his ears. He looks around for the adult the tiny blonde thing grew into.

“Noel?”

“Bedroom.” 

Julian strides in to find Noel hunched at the little desk in the corner, frowning down at something, one pencil over his ear and another between his teeth. “Forward or back?” he asks, without turning around.

“Back,” Julian says.

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah. Met a little boy.” Noel continues staring down at whatever he’s working on. Julian says it again, more emphatically. “Noel. I met a little boy tonight. And he wasn’t me.” 

The words hang in the air for just a moment before they plummet like the lead weights they are, and Noel finally lifts his head, looking at Julian with resignation. In silence, he crosses the room to the small bookcase in the corner, digging a battered copy of _In Watermelon Sugar_ out from the haphazard stacks that bow its shelves. He shakes something loose from its pages.

“First day of school,” he says, as Julian studies the faded little square he’s been handed. A face stares up at him, wide-eyed and uncharacteristically serious, and he knows it instantly. It’s the too-angular face in the background of so many of his early slips in time. It’s the brows that he’s seen furrow in thought and the eyes that have lit up with recognition throughout his timeline. A child who’s known him almost his entire life, but has been hidden from him until now.

“I couldn’t sleep properly for the first month,” Noel is saying. “Then you showed up one night and told me... I don’t remember exactly. Something that made it seem not so bad. I thought you were one of Mum and Dad’s friends at first, they were always popping in and out at all hours. But you were – you. Different.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” 

“I dunno.” He pauses for a moment, teeth worrying at his bottom lip, like he’s on the verge of a confession. “I knew I shouldn’t. I think I knew it even then, that first night I met you, that you were meant to be a secret.” 

Thoughts tumble pell-mell through Julian’s head, racing one after the other, as he tries to work out how many times the pointy-faced blonde child caught his eye throughout the decades. “You can’t– ” he begins, his internal panic almost audible, “you should– you should have told me.”

“But you always said– ”

“No, you should have _told_ me. Don’t you see? You already knew me. When we met, properly met, you already knew who I was. You already knew you’d end up here.”

“I– ”

“You never had a choice; I went crashing through your timeline and now you’re just... an inevitability.”

“When?” Noel demands, grabbing his forearm as he starts to pace back and forth, pinning him in place. There’s something cold, foreign, lurking beneath his words. “When was I s’posed to tell you? When I was eight and I saw you out the window of that sweets shop in Covent Garden? When I was six, sitting up on my nan’s shed roof and you appeared out of nowhere? I wasn’t even sure it was you, but then you disappeared and another one of you popped up two seconds later on the other side of the yard. Or what about when I was sick to my stomach in GCSE year, when I couldn’t sleep and hadn’t seen you for years and was starting to think I’d made you up?” 

His voice cracks on the last few syllables, and when he speaks again, it’s in the gentle, melodic tones Julian has grown used to. The fingers gripping his arm relax and slip away.

“This curse thing: you can only go to stuff in your own life, yeah?” 

“More or less, yes.”

“Well, then, think about it. If you visited me tonight, I had to already be in your life, didn’t I? You’re not just gonna drop in on some random child for a midnight chat, are you?” 

“I... suppose not.” 

“Then that’s not inevitability. You didn’t cause anything, or change anything. You already knew me, not the other way round, that’s why you could visit me back then. Just ‘cos I got to remember it first don’t make it– ” Noel breaks off, gesturing for the word. “It doesn’t mean you forced me to be here. I’m here because I want to be. And things happen because they happen. It’s just they happen the wrong way round for you.” 

Julian looks at him at length. It seems wrong that someone who’s usually half a mile into another world, who doesn’t even own a watch, should have a better understanding of time than he does. But then, maybe that’s the secret. Maybe you can only comprehend something that vast and nonsensical when it’s never had a hold over you. 

“Remember when you got all freaked out about overhearing my voice?” he continues. “It’s the same as that. You appearing in my bedroom twenty years too early doesn’t automatically mean I’m going to like you, does it? You might have frightened the life out of me and I’d never have spoken to you again.”

He has a point. Julian will never to concede it out loud, but his acknowledgement of it seeps through his body, relaxing it by slow degrees.

“You didn’t force me to be here, Ju,” Noel repeats, quietly this time. “You didn’t. I _chose_ to be. Alright?”

“Yeah,” Julian says. “Alright.” 

He’s not entirely sure that it is. But Noel is smiling, and it’s hard to be worried about the coercion of destiny when that face is smiling at you.


	14. January 1981

_January, 1981: Julian is 35, Noel is 8  
\--_

It’s ironically easier to deal with travelling into Noel’s distant childhood than into his own. Most of the time he’s mistaken for a friend of a friend and no one pays him a second glance if he hovers on the fringes of whatever party’s going on this week. Last time it was a barbeque at the height of summer, friends and relatives flitting around the backyard like so many butterflies, too busy cooing at a six-month-old Mike to notice the lanky man on the other side of the yard keeping Noel amused with a football.

This time the yard is quiet. Cold and quiet. There’s no snow on the ground but Julian’s breath frosts the air in front of his face, so if it's not already winter, it’s not far off.

He’s at the very bottom of the garden, near the old wooden shed, and he knows enough by now to know that if he’s outside, so is Noel. He spots him after a second or two, up by the back door, wearing a conical hat. A long piece of red cloth is draped around his shoulders like a cape. 

Julian steps around the corner of the shed, cracking a stray twig under his foot as he does, and Noel jumps like a shot’s gone off. He spins around, staring out into the yard, eyes wide as saucers. 

Julian stops, swallowing hard. He knows Noel was shy child. He knows he never felt like he properly belonged. He knows only too well that underneath his sequins and eyeliner, nothing’s really changed, but that doesn’t make it any easier. His insides clench painfully whenever he sees Noel like this, as though he’s done something horribly wrong and is expecting imminent punishment. 

The fear vanishes from Noel’s face immediately when he realises who he’s looking at. “Hi!” he calls, waving, and Julian’s stomach begin to unknot.

“Hello,” he says as he walks up the yard, trying to work out when exactly he is. Noel doesn’t look all that different from the last time he saw him. “What y’doing?” 

“Playing. Nan says it’s too cold, but Sir Paws don’t mind.” 

“Sir Paws?” 

“Yeah. You know Sir Paws.” Noel points to the step, where a raggedy brown teddy bear is laying under a two foot long plastic sword. Last time Julian met it, its name had been Morph. 

“So I do. Hello, Sir Paws.” He looks from the bear back to Noel. “Are you sure he doesn’t mind? He looks pretty cold to me.” 

Noel squints at the bear. “Nah, he’s alright,” he says. “He’s not a very good knight though. We’re learning about them at school, knights and the middle evils.” 

Julian suppresses a laugh. “You mean the Middle Ages?” 

“My teacher said they were evil,” Noel says, very seriously, and Julian can’t help himself. He sits down on the step, trying to keep his chuckling to a minimum. 

“Do you think she might have said medieval?” 

“Maybe. But I thought knights were good.” 

“They are, mostly. Medieval is just a clever way to say Middle Ages. Want to know why?”

Noel nods. He pushes the sword to one side, picks up Sir Paws by a scruffy arm, and sits down on the step beside him. His eyes are wide again but with curiosity this time. He hasn’t changed at all, Julian thinks – he’s so interested in everything, even all the way back whenever he is. So eager to _know_. He wonders sometimes why Noel pursued art instead of something academic. 

“It’s two words,” he begins, setting his thoughts aside and focusing on the skinny figure beside him. “Medi and eval, and that’s eval with an a, not an i. Medi means middle. Like medium size, see? You have small, medium in the middle, and large. It’s a Latin word.”

“What’s Latin?”

“A language people spoke a long time ago, before English.”

“Middle Ages people?”

“Before then,” Julian says with a smile. “I’ll tell you about it another time. Eval was a French word but they got it from Latin. The Romans – they were the people who spoke Latin – said aevum. That meant age, kind of like eon or era.”

“I know era! It’s in my dinosaur book. There’s a palaeozoic era and a mesozoic era. Dad told me how to say them properly, and _no one_ at school can.”

“Very clever. Now you’ll have more fancy words to impress them with.” 

Noel grins delightedly. 

“So, what’s going on here, Mr. Medieval? Why are you playing outside if your nan says it’s too cold?”

“ _Well_. Sir Paws was being a knight, like Sir Brian in Winnie-the-Pooh, only Nan said being knights was too noisy, ‘cos of the horses and swords and stuff. So we said we’d play outside and _she_ said it was too cold but I told her Sir Paws has got loads of fur and I’ve got _three_ shirts on. So then she said alright, but only if I promise to eat all my broccoli at tea.”

“Sounds like a fair trade. And what’s this?” He motions to Noel’s hat and cape. “Are you a wizard?”

“ _No_. I’m a _lady_.”

“Oh. I see.” Julian tilts his head and regards Noel for a moment. “Why do you want to be a lady?” he asks, hoping he’s managed to sound curious rather than accusatory. He’s so used to his Noel wearing mascara and girls’ clothing that it’s never really occurred to ask _why_ he does it. “Don’t you like knights?”

“Nope. Ladies got to wear better colours. All the knights we seen at school were boring and grey.” Noel bites on his bottom lip thoughtfully. “And anyway, if me and Sir Paws are both knights, how do I get rescued?

“Rescued?”

“Yeah. Knights all go round rescuing ladies from towers and dungeons, and the ladies get to live in castles and no one tells them what to do. They don’t gotta eat broccoli if they don’t want, and there’s no little brothers and sisters to take everyone away.”

There’s anger in Noel’s voice; proper anger, that goes beyond a strop about vegetables. A deep scowl mars his features for a few seconds before he huffs and smoothes his expression back to passive neutrality, like he’s done this before and knows better than to try again. 

Julian sighs, realising exactly when he is. “Where are your parents, Noel?” he asks softly.

“Hospital.”

“Are you going to have a baby brother or sister soon?”

He nods. “Nan says I have to be a big boy now, an’ help Mum and Dad and I just want - ” 

He breaks off, eyebrows knitted again, and Julian recognises the frustration on his face. It’s a look he’s come to know well. He stays silent, letting him find the words he needs.

“Everyone’s talking about the baby,” Noel says finally, folding his arms around himself and scuffing the toe of his shoe against the brick pathway. “No one wants to play with me anymore. And knights are s’posed to save ladies in distress, the book _said_. I asked Nan what distress meant and she said sad, so I thought if I be the lady, a knight’ll come and take me away somewhere. And then I can live in a castle and play and draw, ‘cos no one here’ll care if I go anyway.”

“I don’t think that’s true. Your parents love you very much.”

“How do you know?”

Julian thinks of Noel’s mother, sitting in every dark, crowded pub they’ve performed in and clapping like she’s never heard the jokes before in her life. He thinks of the look she exchanged with Noel’s dad when Noel first brought Julian to a family lunch, and the way they’d both hugged him and told him of course he was welcome, and not to be silly. He thinks of the pride that spills from them whenever they look at their eldest son, and wishes he could tell the skinny, sandy-haired boy in front of him how special he really is.

“I just do.”

Noel huffs again, quietly, but he unfolds his arms. Julian picks up the toy sword. His head doesn’t hurt, his mouth’s not dry and there’s no sick beat thrumming through his veins. He has a good while yet. 

“I can’t take you away,” he says, standing up and flourishing the sword in Noel’s direction, “but if you want a knight for the afternoon, you can have me.”

The smile on Noel’s face is about a mile and a half wide.

Their afternoon passes in a blur. One hour, two hours, maybe four hours – Julian really has no idea. He rescues Noel from an apple tree tower and they ride invisible horses back to his shed castle. Noel borrows his sword, laughing with giddy abandon as he battles a shrub troll, and then dances in circles around the yard with Sir Paws until he’s falling over with dizziness. Julian helps him up and dances him back up the yard, Noel’s tiny feet on top of his and his hands clutching Julian’s fingers. By the time his nan calls down from the window, they’re both out of breath, slumped on the step at the back door. 

“You should probably go in now,” Julian says, exhaustion seeping through to his bones. There’s a tell-tale throb at his temple. “It’s getting cold, and I’ll have to go soon.”

“Okay,” Noel says, and if he’s not protesting he must be as tired as Julian feels. “Thanks for staying. You’re a cool knight. Better than Sir Paws.”

Julian pushes up off the step and bows deeply in front of him. “You’re very welcome. You were a most charming lady.”

Noel giggles, pushing at a bit of scruffy blonde fringe. It falls straight back into his eyes. “I’m gonna make a better hat for next time. I’ll put ribbons on it. And we’ll watch for you! Me and Sir Paws, we can watch from the window for when you come back, like a real lady in a tower.”

Julian smiles, and brushes Noel’s hair out of his eyes properly. “Don’t sit around waiting for me,” he says. “Just... do what you normally do. You’ll see me soon enough, I promise. Now go on, get inside before your nan comes out here. She’ll have both our hides.”

Noel scrambles up the stairs and into the house, turning just before he pushes the door closed. 

“Julian?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Just one. A little sister.”

“Is she your friend?”

“She is. She was my best friend when we were young.”

Noel chews on his bottom lip for a second. “Do you think my brother-or-sister will want to be my friend?”

“I think when they’re old enough, they’ll want that more than anything in the world.”

Noel looks down at his feet, a small, pleased smile creeping onto his face. “Cool,” he says, and pushes the door closed.

Julian’s head gives a resounding throb, and when he blinks again, he’s back in his own lounge room. Noel’s sitting by the window, curtain pulled back so he can look out without interference. The sight is inexplicably touching. _Still waiting_ , Julian thinks to himself. _Always waiting_. 

He moves forward a step, speaking softly so as not to startle Noel. “I’m home.”

“Hey,” Noel breathes, jumping up from his seat and darting across the room to wrap his arms around Julian in a quick hug. “Where’d you go?”

“1981.”

“Oh, when? Was I there?”

Julian pulls back and bows low in front of him, sweeping up his hand to place a kiss on the top of Noel’s knuckles. 

“Oh my god,” he laughs. “I remember that! Just before Mike was born, yeah? How bent was I? Eight years old and already dressing up like a girl.”

“You were adorable.” 

“You were,” he retorts, slipping his arms back around Julian’s waist and leaning his head against his shoulder. “You were a perfect knight.”

“Was I just?” Julian murmurs. “I seem to remember something about knights carrying ladies off to towers.” 

He bends before Noel can stop him, sweeping one arm behind his knees and plucking him up off his feet as if he were still a child. Noel squeals, wrapping his arms tightly around Julian’s neck, every inch the princess he wanted to be twenty years ago. He tips his head back and laughs at the ceiling, and the sound rings out down the hallway like golden bells as Julian carries him into their bedroom.


	15. February 2003

_February, 2003: Noel is 29, Julian is 41_  
\--

There’s a knock on the door mere seconds after Noel sits down, and he springs up off the sofa with a grin. “What’d you forget this- oh.”

Julian is standing there, as he expected. He’s just not the _one_ he expected. 

“Hey Noel,” he says softly. 

“Hey,” Noel replies, tracking his eyes over Julian’s face, casting back in his mind for the last time he saw this version of it. 

He’s older, perhaps. There seems to be a little more salt-grey around his temples than there was at his very last visit, but Noel can’t be sure that’s not a trick of memory or the light. The faded bruises of indigo under his eyes say he’s still not sleeping, not that that’s any indication of time; Julian’s never slept well, not for as long as Noel has known him. But there is a light brush of gold shimmering around the edges of his pupils. He’s happier than the last time he looked into Noel’s eyes, so if that sprinkle of silver is true, he must be from later.

“Can I come in?” Julian asks, his words still soft and somehow hesitant, like he’s not sure what the answer will be. Noel steps backward and sideways, pulling the door open wide as he goes.

“’Course. Sorry.”

Julian’s walk down the hall is slow and faltering, his steps as hesitant as his words were. He looks left and right, back to where Noel is standing, and Noel can see the clockwork that makes up his ludicrous, beautiful mind whirring. It’s not just trying to place himself in context. It’s calculating.

He lets the heavy wooden door fall shut and pads down the hall to where Julian is standing. Even in his heeled boots, he has to tilt his head upwards to look him in the eyes. Julian doesn’t speak until Noel reaches up, brushing his knuckles along the stubble on the underside of his jaw. His hand finds Noel’s, wraps around it.

“It’s been a while since I dropped in, hasn’t it?”

“About two years,” Noel nods, no need for hesitation. The silver is more obvious in the light and in any case, he’ll always hedge his bets on precious metals.

“Two _years_? Jesus.” Julian rubs one hand across his forehead. His other is still clutching Noel’s, and Noel tugs him by it, out of the shadowy hallway, into their front room. “I know you said a while, but - ”

“ _You_ said a while,” Noel says, frowning slightly as he tries to grasp the watercolour threads of their past conversations. They’re drowning in backdrop, grey clouded skies and bleeding sunlight, and the high-pitched grumbling of upset snapdragons. “I mean... will say. You said it to me, but not yet. Or maybe-” there, he has it now, blue and green pastels like seawater caught in a cup, “maybe you said – say – it to me ‘cos I told you to last time. So neither of us said it really. How come you were outside? You’re lucky you didn’t bump into yourself.”

“I...” Julian scratches his temple, rubbing the hand across his forehead again. The gears and cogs are locking into one another, fanning and sorting Noel’s words in the magical way only Julian has. Noel waits. Translating colours into clockwork can take a while, sometimes. 

“I did,” Julian starts again. The same word, but a different sentence. “He told me you were in.”

“Oh.”

“Where was he – I – going?”

“Casting meeting.” Noel grins. Their last couple of conversations are flooding back now, the fits and starts, the need to keep things hidden. This, at least, he can share. “We’ve gone to series.”

Julian’s face breaks out into a grin, a mirror of the one he wore last week when they found out together. A blush of pink unfurls through Noel’s chest.

“It’s 2003,” he says. “God, you have so much to look forward to. What have you written?”

“Tundra, obviously,” Noel begins. “Tea?”

He’s already moving towards the kitchen when Julian nods his vague assent. The ritual of tea – made, clutched, abandoned while they lose themselves in forests and bubblegum – is engraved on their history now. _No_ was never a possibility.

Noel walks Julian through the rest of the series as the kettle boils. _Charlie. Jungle. Hitcher._ The half-finished scripts, and the finished ones that Steve sent back dripping with red suggestions. The reworks, and the ideas for new monsters. Rich’s latest impromptu performance as Bob Fossil at the pub one night, so outlandish that Dave had choked on his beer and had to be pounded back into breathing normally.

He carries the mugs of steaming tea back to the front room, placing them on the coffee table as he settles on the sofa next to Julian. 

They’d sat in the armchairs the last time he slipped here, Noel recalls.

“Thanks,” Julian says softly as Noel sets the tea down. He makes no move to pick it up. 

Silence descends; long, pulsating seconds with no words to mask them. Noel fidgets in his seat as he reaches for his tea. It seems suddenly wrong to be sitting here like this, so close to a Julian who isn’t quite his, but isn’t quite not.

He doesn’t contemplate moving to the armchair. 

“2003,” Julian repeats, finally tempering the silence. There is warmth in his voice, such warmth that a rush of crimson goes curling through Noel’s body, but that hesitation from earlier has crept back too. Noel’s grip on the mug tightens as Julian speaks again. “What I wouldn’t give... You’re going to have such an incredible time.”

“I know,” he whispers in reply. Julian’s eyes fix on him, burnished gold highlights gleaming. His insides are clamouring in a way they haven’t since his graduation: he’s full of pink, swirling pastels and deep bushels of fuchsia. There’s something shimmering, just _there_ between them, as pale and as fragile as spun sugar. _That’s what time looks like_ , Noel thinks hazily as the shimmer encircles him and the pinks go careening through his body. It’s their past and their future, a sliver of a moment they’re both barely holding onto. Their timelines are spider-webs, and his breath is a furnace of vermillion. If he breathes wrong this whole thing will unravel and go melting into the dew. 

Noel inhales just once, so softly, the barest lick of air. And then Julian rests a hand on the top of his thigh.

There have been so few kisses out of time that each one is like starting over, thrilling not so much for its newness but for all the familiarities of a stranger’s mouth. Noel lets himself drift wholly into the sensations of Julian’s hands and tongue, his warmth, the press of a hand between his legs. He breathes out the flames inside him, and breathes in deep ocean blue, losing himself so utterly in the melding of colour that he doesn’t realise he’s standing until he feels Julian start walking him backwards. 

He’s jolted back to himself by a sudden push, his breath coming out in a rush as his arse hits the mattress and the room dissolves into a blur of Julian’s hands and tongue and teeth. Those teeth are working their way along his earlobe when Noel stretches his fingers downward, squirming underneath Julian for a slightly better angle.

Julian pauses mid-nip, turning his head to look behind him, down to where Noel’s heel is hooked up on the end of the bed and his fingers are tugging at the zipper of his left boot. 

“Why are you wearing shoes indoors?” he asks, pushing up off his elbows, transferring the weight to the knee that’s wedged between Noel’s crotch.

“I was going out,” Noel replies, his voice thin and reedy in his ears as he draws in a shaky breath. His body is overflowing scarlet. His cock aches with the sudden lack of Julian’s weight on it. “I’m supposed to be signing the lease for our new flat this afternoon.”

“We’re moving?”

“Next week.”

“I see.” Julian glances at his watch. He’s standing now, at the foot of the bed with Noel’s discarded boots, feet planted firmly between Noel’s own, forcing his knees apart. His eyes flick back to Noel’s, that hungry gold glimmering brighter than ever. “What time?”

“Five.”

“Well.” He smirks as he runs a hand through his hair, all chocolate and silver and rumpled desire. “I was going to take my time with you,” his fingers are on the button of Noel’s trousers, pulling him half to his feet, flicking expertly, “but given the circumstances-” 

The sentence hangs unfinished between them as Julian gives a swift yank, tugging trousers and underwear down together, and Noel goes tumbling backward once more onto the bed, Julian’s mouth swallowing his cock a second later like an exclamation point.

There’s something decadent about being flat underneath this future version of his lover. There’s something extravagant and obscene about being ravished by a different mouth, about another Julian’s hands roaming up and over and under him. About the way they grip Noel’s flesh and pin his hips, so that he can’t thrust up and fuck him like he suddenly, desperately, needs to. Noel hears gasps and moans and strings of nonsense escaping his own lips, and Julian’s mouth goes on moving, up and down, maddeningly slowly. 

“Ju,” he whispers, and feels him smile in response.

“ _Ju_ ,” he tries again, this one a strangled whimper. There’s a final, deliberate slide of heat right down his cock and then a blur of motion and void. Julian’s mouth finds his. Julian’s hand snakes down between their bodies, wrapping itself around Noel’s aches, moving faster and faster until he comes in shudders, mewling, shaking, gasping for breath.

Afterwards, there’s silence: the deep, calm silence of their intermingling breaths. When the room stops spinning, Noel rolls onto his side. Julian’s eyes are still trained on him, their bright gold shimmer now the soft, burnt caramel of a Werthers. Noel traces a finger lightly along his jaw, feeling the relief and release written there. 

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” he quips, echoing Julian’s question in the hallway, and Julian laughs as Noel knew he would.

“A little while,” he murmurs, shoulders rising in an approximation of a shrug. “It’s hard just now. The twins.”

Noel bolts upright, twisting round to look down at the man beside him. “We have twins?”

“Fuck.” Julian pushes himself up into a sitting position as well, groaning a little as he does. “No. Sort of. I can’t say, you know that.”

There’s no panic in Julian’s words, so Noel rolls his eyes and gives an exaggerated huff. “You always say that.” 

“That’s because it’s always true.” Julian pokes a finger into his ribs as he replies. “Shouldn’t you be going?” he asks, as Noel squirms away. “It’s almost five.”

“They’re pretty used to me being late.” 

“Still.”

Noel rolls his eyes, but he’s already on his feet, cleaning himself as best as he can with a handful of tissues. “Cool your boots,” he quips as he tugs his trousers back on. “It’ll be fine. Which you should already know, anyway – got any memories of us living in Hackney?”

A small smile crosses Julian’s face. It’s all the answer Noel needs.

“There you go.” He shoves one foot, then the other, into his boots, and picks his way over to Julian with the zippers still undone. “How are you?” he asks softly. “In the future?”

Julian takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly before he answers. “Good,” he says slowly. “Getting there. It’s not over yet, but we’re getting there.”

“And these twins, how old are they?”

“No.” Julian shakes his head, resigned and wry. “You’re incorrigible. Go on, get off with you. Go sign your papers. I’ll be back as soon I can.”

As he speaks those last few words, a hushed, forgotten conversation comes flitting back through the decades, filling Noel’s mind for a brief moment with night, with starlight, with magic.

_“I’ll come back another time. I promise.”_

_“Tomorrow?”_

_“Maybe not quite that soon.”_

Noel leans forward to press a chaste kiss against Julian’s cheek. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Ju. You’ll be back one day. And in about three hours time. I’ll see you when you get here.”


	16. April 2008

_April, 2008: Julian is 39, Noel is 34 and 28  
\--_

Noel appears only seconds after Julian gets his bearings, wandering out of the kitchen with a paintbrush in one hand and another tucked behind his ear, clutching a mug of steaming tea. To his credit, he drops neither tea nor paintbrush – but then, Noel has never been fazed overly much by the fantastical. Julian supposes it’s hard to be, when a grown man has been dropping in on you unannounced since you were five years old. Now he simply raises one mildly quizzical eyebrow, sets his tea on the window ledge, and heads towards a sheet of yellow-dyed fabric that’s draped over a clothes airer and half-covered in teal and purple paint.

“That was quick.” 

The expression on his face can only mean one thing, but Julian knows without a second look that he hasn’t set foot in this particular flat for years. “How long since you’ve seen me?”

“’Bout a week. I thought you said-” Noel breaks off, his eyes narrowing. “When are you from?” 

“When was I from then?” Julian counters, receiving only a shrewd look for his efforts.

“Later, I reckon. Not much later though.”

“What year?”

Noel shakes his head. “What year are you from now?”

He’s taught him well, Julian reflects, a mixture of pride and chagrin fizzling through him. Two and a half decades of practice have brought him to the point where he can usually find out whatever he needs to know, wherever he’s travelled, with only a few questions. That’s clearly not going to be the case tonight. 

“2008,” he sighs. “And I know this flat. Where’s the other me? I don’t think I ever met myself here.”

“In bed with a filthy flu, snoring like a steam train.” 

“Fuck off, I don’t snore.” 

“You do,” Noel laughs. “I’m surprised you can’t hear yourself.” 

“I certainly do not, sir.”

A muffled, but nevertheless distinct, rumbling sound chooses that moment to drift out and into their ears. Julian rolls his eyes heavenward. There’s no point praying it’s an isolated occurrence; with the luck he’s having today, prayers will just make his past self louder. Noel blessedly says nothing, just presses his hands to his belly and laughs silently the way he did – or will do – during the opening credits of their first season. 

“Are you done?”

“You’re ridiculous,” Noel says, hilarity lurking at the edges of his voice, but he takes a deep breath and picks up his tea mug. “Come on, then. Sit down. Tell me what it is, ‘cos it’s something, yeah?”

Julian sits. Noel’s reassurance is touching, almost innocent. It burrows under his defences without him even noticing. He means to say ‘it’s nothing’ or ‘I’ll be right’; instead he finds himself asking plaintively, “How was I, last time?”

Noel leans back in his armchair. He crosses one leg over the other, bringing his mug to rest on his knee, hands wrapped around it and fingers interlocked. For a long, unnerving moment, he is perfectly still. 

“Older,” he says, finally moving to brush at a stray lock of hair that’s falling into his eyes. “A bit, anyway. But you looked happier.”

“When was I from, Noel?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes. No. Fuck, I don’t know, everything’s twisted and you’re– I can’t...” 

The words he’s trying to pronounce are capering just ahead of him, laughing giddily on his tongue-tip as they evade capture. Julian runs a hands through his hair distractedly and tries again. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We talked about it, it was _fine_. And now suddenly it’s not, and I just-”

He breaks off again, with a start this time. Noel’s posture has changed during this last string of babble; little things, barely enough for the average person to notice. His shoulders are squared back against the armchair. His knuckles are slightly whiter, his grip on the mug of tea slightly tighter. His face is a calm, considered mask. 

To the casual observer, he’s a man assessing the outburst before him with care. To Julian, he’s a textbook of terror. 

“Christ, Noel, I don’t mean _you_. Jesus.” There is a razor-sharp edge to his syllables and when he speaks again, he pitches his voice lower, rounding it as best he can. “I don’t mean you. It’s not you. I promise.”

“Then what?” 

Noel’s words are cautious, but his body is already relaxing in minute increments. His shoulder droops a degree. One finger loosens. Julian takes a slow, measured breath. A memory rises in his mind, as vivid now as it was a fortnight ago when Julia woke to feed the twins and found him missing. He sees once more the panic that was coursing through her when he returned, hears the hysteria that coloured her voice as she hissed obscenities at him, trying to quiet Walter’s screams. It’s easier to count the number of days they _haven’t_ fought since then than those they have. 

“When was I from?” he asks again, his voice little more than a whisper. “What did I say?” 

“I can’t,” Noel shakes his head miserably. “I _can’t_ , Ju. You have all these rules that you break whenever you feel like, but-”

“I know,” Julian cuts in gently, not needing to hear the remainder of that sentence. He knows all too well; hearing it from Noel’s mouth now only makes it cut more deeply. He draws another breath, as much air as his lungs will allow, trying to slow the whirlwind of thoughts battering his temples. “It’s not fair. I know it’s not fair. You’re only doing what I asked you to.”

 _There has to be some way_ , he thinks, the image of Arthur and Walter rising up in his mind again. He has no idea what his future self said a week ago, or how much Noel might already know, but there _has_ to be some way he can work out what comes next. A way for him to fix this before he hurts anyone else.

“I’ll have a son one day,” he says finally. “That was the first thing my dad told me, when this started. I’ll have a son, and this ... _thing_ will pass on to him. That’s all we know for sure, after nearly two hundred years.”

“I remember,” Noel begins softly, but Julian holds up a finger to stop him from continuing and speaks again. They’re careful words, some of them barely grazing the edges of truth, but none are outright falsehoods.

“That little boy, _my son_ , is going to have a mother. And I don’t know how she’s going to cope with this. I don’t know if she’ll come around eventually, or if she’ll run screaming in the opposite direction when she realises what it means for him. I don’t know how _he’ll_ cope, whether I’ll get to teach him about this ridiculous legacy, or whether- whether she’ll take him away or... I don’t know what to do,” he finishes, helpless and horrified by the sound of his voice cracking on the last word. His hands gesture uselessly of their own accord. “Noel, what am I supposed to do?” 

Noel leans forward, setting his mug on the coffee table. One hand reaches through the dimly-lit space to find Julian’s knee. His voice is gentle. 

“Do whatever makes you happy.” 

Julian looks at him for as long as he can bear, a single moment that feels like all the ages of the world. His eyes shy away from Noel’s, glancing down instead to the fingers that brush the knee of his trousers. In this light they’re pale and ethereal, like lost butterflies, pale as winter sunlight and decorated in gauzy black paint smudges. One flitters into the air, stopping just shy of cupping Julian’s chin. 

Julian lifts his gaze once more to meet Noel’s. His eyes are a calm, glacial blue. He speaks so softly that Julian has to lean forward to catch his words.

“You can’t change it, right? You’ve always told me you can help in little ways, but whatever’s gonna happen, you can’t change it.” He straightens then, sitting back to regard Julian. His hand falls away, almost landing in his lap before it drifts upward again at the last minute to tangle absently in the ends of his hair. “When you were here last week, you told me it’d be a while til I saw you again. I don’t think you meant then-you, I think it’s now-you. But it’ll be okay. You said that too, and I think... I think it’s one of them little ways. Like maybe you told me it for your sake – cos I’ve always known we’ll be okay.”

A short, hysterical burst of laughter breaks its way out of Julian’s mouth. He screws his eyes shut momentarily, half-afraid it will continue, more afraid that it will stop as suddenly as it began or be replaced with tears.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s sitting in the dove-grey bedroom he shares with Julia. The bright, cool light of midday is pouring through their balcony doors. He waits for a moment, concentrating on his breathing; one deep, calming inhalation after the other. Then he stands, walks to his study with firm, measured steps, and pulls his great-grandfather’s diary down from the uppermost shelf.

When Julia comes home with the twins that afternoon, he helps settle them into their high chairs and feeds them both at once, plastic spoon aeroplanes of mashed pumpkin landing from left and right. He bathes Arthur while Julia dresses Walter, and strums a Spanish-style melody on the ukulele until they’re both dozing. Later, much later, he and Julia sit together at the kitchen table and manage a civil, if quiet, tea.

The next afternoon he returns to his study. He sits in the old, oversized leather chair at his desk, picks up his mobile, and presses the call button. It’s a short conversation, barely five minutes long, but when he finishes he feels calmer than he has in weeks.

The act plays out again that evening. There are different guest stars: ham and peas instead of pumpkin; the soft, melodic strains of Julia’s voice replacing the ukulele. They manage a second tea together. A third. A sixth. 

The reprieve lasts until the first time Julian slips again.

It happens with no warning at all. He’s spooning tonight’s beef and carrot stew into a bowl for Walter, remembering the phone call and wondering if he’s made the right decision, when he blinks and finds himself in the middle of a silent, woodland pathway. It takes a moment for him to place it as a walking trail in Leeds he used to wander along as a teenager. 

It takes another moment for the consequence of this to sink in.

He’s not there long – he has time to find a signpost and work out where exactly between Woodhouse Moor and Golden Acre he is before he’s back in his kitchen – but it’s long enough. He finds Julia clutching Walter tightly. She’s ashen-faced and trembling, and he knows immediately that he’s _royally_ buggered. 

There are no moments of peace to anticipate now. The arguments are ever-present, hissed or spat at one another under their breath if the twins are there, and screamed between rooms if they’re not. If the panic and rage that rushed through Julia a week prior was a flood, then this is a deluge, a dam bursting with full, brutal force. A tsunami. Julian can’t blame her, if he’s being honest; before, it was almost a joke. Him, drifting in and out of time while Julia read over lines in the front room. Her, sleeping through Julian’s departure to _and_ return from a midnight jaunt into his past. He’d hardly travelled during her pregnancy, as though the twins were an anchor tethering him to the present, and not at all in the ten months since their birth. Now, suddenly, she’s confronted afresh with the all-too-real possibility that the father of her children might suddenly vanish at any moment, and the worse realisation that – one day – they will too. She is consumed by the sudden, irrefutable awareness of time. Again and again she insists that sixteen is too young, that even then they’re just _babies_ , that there _has_ to be something he can do to stop it if he’d just bother looking hard enough.

He’s not really sure how raising time-travelling twins alone is any better than doing it with someone who’s been slipping in and out of history for the past twenty-five years, but Julia seems to be calmer when they’re in separate dwellings. She begins staying with her parents at weekends, then for weeks at a time. Julian begins packing. Just the essentials at first, but soon the boxes are piling one on top of the other. When they contain most of his belongings, he vacates the house for a tidy, light-filled flat a few blocks away.

He unpacks slowly. Weeks, then months, rush by in a blur. Stress has always affected his travelling, and usually for the worse, but it hasn’t played this much havoc with his life since his A-levels. He slides in and out of days and nights, never sure where he’ll end up or what mess he’ll come back to, who he’s fucked off this time. Noel tells him he needs to eat more. 

He and Julia meet with the mediator as required. They outline strategies, care plans for the children, the division of common property. 

Julian stops sleeping; the disorientation when he slips during sleep is worse than the fuzzy-minded deprivation if he forces himself to stay awake. On the rare nights that he doesn’t travel, he spends the long, dark hours tossing and turning, entombing himself in his sheets. He tries drinking himself into oblivion, clutching desperately at the hope that, with enough alcohol, his mind will shut off and give him at least a few hours’ rest. More often than not he travels anyway and suffers through twice the hangover the next day. Noel appears from nowhere bearing aspirin and a cup of tea each time, and pleads with him again to come stay with him, at least until the slips ease off.

He travels three times the week he signs the divorce papers. He lifts his head from his bowl of cereal to see a gravelled laneway stretching out in front of him and, a little way down it, a straw-haired child sitting atop a garden shed with a stripy grey cat beside him. There’s barely time to lift his hand in greeting before he’s dropped back into his own time. He slips into a purple autumn evening while folding laundry, and spends half an hour sitting opposite the pond on Hampstead Heath, watching himself and Noel sip tea miserably from takeaway paper cups. He doesn’t need to hear their mumbled conversation. He remembers this day in awful clarity: how Noel had listlessly crumbled the ginger biscuits he’d bought into the grass, how he had taken Noel’s cold, paint-stained hands in his own and held them tight, promising him it would be alright, that they’d work something out. He dozes on the sofa one evening while a repeat of Morecambe and Wise plays softly in the background, jolting awake as his surroundings suddenly change for a bright expanse of green on a chilly, grey morning. Half a second later he spots a tall, lanky man in the distance, and a teenage boy bouncing a football off his knees, heel, inner ankle, forehead. He can almost feel the memory of his own breath, steaming out in little dragon puffs while Noel had recounted how he’d thought he made Julian up. Julian watches the two of them from across the pitch, peering around the bole of an ancient horse chestnut, until Noel waves and his past self vanishes. He ducks back behind the tree as Noel looks towards him, breath catching in his throat, and he’s back in his sitting room again as suddenly as he left it.

There is a constant tightness in his chest. Each time he turns around, the hours of his life clutch at him with a sick, vertiginous lurch. His timelines are tangling, spiralling in on an event horizon he can’t even see, much less avoid. In the back of his mind is a drum beat, a mantra, the memory of his own words via Noel. It runs through his head, night and day, a thumping, three-word refrain. 

_It’ll be okay_.

Julian tries, as hard as he can, to believe this.


	17. April 2008

_April, 2008: Noel is 34, Julian is 39_  
\--

It’s not that Noel is surprised, exactly, to see Julian’s name displayed on his caller ID. They do still call each other on occasion. It’s just that those calls are fewer, much farther between, and generally only if they’re working on something or are in different cities. They have their days together – several of which have been rescheduled recently, with a flurry of apologies and Julian’s self-deprecating jokes about his sub-par parenting – and if there’s something that comes up between, well. It’s a pretty short walk across the street.

Noel wipes his hands on a rag, then on his overalls. There’s not much point for the extra caution; his phone case is already marked with purple whorls and black smears, the victim of half a dozen other calls he received during studio sessions.

“Hey,” he says, and after a moment’s silence, the word is repeated back to him.

“Hey.”

Julian’s voice has more flatnesses than most people Noel knows; he can count at least four without trying. When Julian is tired, it’s flat like butter melting into toast, warm and languid, with absolutely zero desire to modulate. When he’s angry, it’s like freshly poured tar, a thick black ooze that will burn you if you come close enough. When he tries out new material, it’s a cat slinking low to the ground, as though it can sneak up on you even though it’s right there in plain sight in the middle of the room. And sometimes – when everything is settled and time has ticked properly into place – Julian’s voice is the thin flatness of a knife blade, flicking out from his tongue, shaving through your sentences with its witty razor edge. 

The flatness of his ‘hey’ is none of these. It’s a long grey cloud, gathering just above Noel’s head. It’s wrong.

“What’s going on?”

At first the only reply is silence. When Julian does start to speak, it’s with halting, monosyllabic words, a dot-point documentation of his past fortnight. How he’s started travelling again. How he went back to 2001, just yesterday, to their old flat in Dalston. Julia’s sudden fear and revulsion at his slips, his worry that he’ll hurt her, that he has already. That the two of them will hurt the twins.

“I think… She’s better when I’m not there. Maybe if we – if we separated, divorced…” Julian’s voice has become bitter, thick and soiled like used coffee grinds. Noel almost wishes for the fat grey clouds again. “I never really wanted to get married.”

That’s not a regret, just simple truth. Noel remembers how both their parents – first Julia’s, then Julian’s – had insisted on a wedding once they found out Julia was pregnant. How their efforts had redoubled when they learned it was twins, as if the number of children somehow made a difference. He remembers his own reaction when Julian told him, that horrible afternoon in the park: it had been freezing outside, but not as cold as his insides were as he listened to Julian promise that they’d be okay. That everything would work itself out. He’d taken a shower so hot it had scalded him, marking long red welts down his back and over his shoulders that still didn’t hurt enough. He’d ignored four calls from Julian that night, sitting on his sofa as the sky grew dark around him, watching his cups of tea go cold in succession. 

Then his doorbell had rung, and Julia had been there, red-cheeked and effervescent in the freezing navy night, clasping his hands in her own right there in the doorway and telling him that nothing would change, nothing _had_ changed, that Julian’s heart was bigger than galaxies and she’d never much cared for what other people thought anyway. 

Noel smiles at that. 

“Do you remember how she looked walking down the aisle?” he asks, and Julian’s laughter comes, suddenly warm, down the line.

“Ridiculous.”

“We never should have let her wear that dress.”

“She wouldn’t have listened.” 

Another truth. For almost five years now, that fierce, blonde hurricane has circled in and around Noel’s life. True to her word, she’s never stepped between the two of them. The day after the wedding, she had taken her new husband’s hand and placed it in Noel’s, gently closing his fingers around Julian’s. “Go,” she’d said, practically shooing them out of the house. “I’m too pregnant and too tired to want anything beyond a cup of tea and the telly right now, and I can get both of those things myself.” She’s generous to a fault, and has never learnt how to bow to conventionalism. And even if its voluminous skirts _had_ enhanced the size of her belly – a fact her mother had lamented over constantly during the rehearsal dinner - she’d have strung up anyone who had tried to stop her wearing the rich cream dress with its high waist and gold lacework.

“No chance,” Noel agrees.

“And she did look beautiful in the photos.” There’s a soft pause on the other end of the phone, punctuated by a deep, resigned breath. “I don’t want to hurt her, Noel. I love her, she’s one of my best friends. I’ve never met anyone like her. I just… what am I supposed to do?”

There’s a dim tinkling in the back of Noel’s mind, a spark triggered by the combination of word and tone. _It’s not you. You’re only doing what I asked you to. I don’t know what to do._

“You’ve asked me that before,” he says slowly.

Julian’s sigh is deeper this time, even more defeated. “Yesterday,” he admits. “In 2001. You thought I meant us.”

“Yeah. It was dark. I was working on – what was I painting?” Noel looks down at his hands as the colours of so long ago start drifting back, coalescing into images. “There was black and purple on my hands then, too. I was worried I’d get it on you.”

“Something yellow.”

“Yeah,” he says again, a soft smile creeping onto his face as that long ago night starts to move into focus. One of the Auto Boosh backdrops. He’d liked that one. “What’d I say? Back then, what’d I tell you?”

“To do what makes me happy.”

Six words. Noel turns each one over in his mind, feeling its individual shape and weight. His memory of the Dalston flat dissolves as he does so, morphing into a foggy grey day at the end of winter, his hands and toes and arse all freezing as he sat with his legs tucked up against his chest and listened to Julian promise again that everything would be alright.

_Do what makes you happy_. They’re heavy words, like meteors. Navy and copper, shot through with silver stardust. They’re right.

“Then do that,” he says. “You’re good with instinct. You always work it out in the end, one way or another.”

There is a long silence on the other end of the line, but it’s not the tense, fraught thing from the start of their conversation. It’s what their lives come down to. Silences, big and little, and the myriad hues of the words they pass to one another. Nebulae. Hours in rainbows. A binary star system.

“Thanks,” Julian whispers finally. “I… I better go. Bye, Noel.”

“Bye Ju,” he says, and then, just as the end call tone sounds, “Love you.”


	18. March, 2013

_March, 2013: Noel is 39, Julian is 44_  
\--

“Boys! Lunch.”

Noel pauses on the balcony, watching the two chestnut-haired boys below him for a few seconds. They’d been playing a bastardised version of football with rules he couldn’t follow when he’d gone inside half an hour ago. Currently, they’re chasing one another around the wooden skittles he and Julian had hammered into the yard to serve as goal boundaries, shrieking with joy as they go. The football winks white and navy at him, forgotten in the deepest corner of the back garden.

There’s a lightness under Noel’s feet as he heads back inside. It’s not spring yet, not for a week or so, but the sun is already back and the sky is a clear, blinding blue. The faint smell of daphne drifts by, borne along on a breeze summer has lent them. 

It’s a yellow day, no question. Julian, however, sitting at the kitchen table with one hand in a pocket and a small frown creasing his brow, is inexplicably grey.

“I remember my nan doing that,” Noel says, hoping the words will be enough to shake loose whatever’s got its claws in him. “Shouting down the backyard at me from her kitchen window at tea time. It’s always winter, in my memory, that bit right before it gets properly dark, when the sun’s gone but there’s still that tiny bit of light and you know if you can just _think_ hard enough, you can keep it there a bit longer.” He smiles softly, more for himself than for Julian, as the memory of that melancholy light fills his head. “Then you blink and – night time. It was always full dark by the time I actually went inside.”

A small, absent huff of laughter is Julian’s only reply. The claws are deep, this time. Noel pulls out the chair opposite him and sits.

“Tell me.”

Julian looks up this time, his expression clearing momentarily before he frowns again, more deliberately this time.

“I still don’t know what it means,” he says, and Noel knows exactly where they are even before Julian extracts the little bronze hourglass from his pocket. He sets it on the table between them. “I was sixteen when I got this. They’re already six.”

Noel picks the hourglass up, turning it over in his hands. It’s cold, as always. The glass beads it houses do not slip back to the other end when he holds it upside down. He runs his thumb over Julian’s name engraved on the bottom, the old story of his sixteenth birthday echoing through his mind. The few beads that remain in the top well tinkle against one another softly. One slip for every bead, until all the beads have fallen. 

He’d tried to help Julian work out what that riddle in the diary meant, when they’d first started going out. But time has never been Noel’s strength. He forgets it, more often than not, leaves it tangled up in the sidelines or confuses it, bundling it up into the wrong size parcels. He and time have circled one another for years, each content to let the other to his own devices. It’s better that way.

The pale gold spheres that count out Julian’s time catch the sunlight pouring through the window. They sparkle in the corners of Noel’s vision.

“Thirty years,” Julian is saying, distaste colouring his words. “I’ve had the damn thing for almost _thirty years_ , and I’m no closer to solving it than when dad gave it to me.”

“Maybe you don’t need to.” Noel puts the hourglass back on the table. “It’s nearly empty.”

“I know. There’s only a dozen or so still to fall, I counted. That means a dozen trips, to find – what was that bloody passage? – the day ‘that will come again’.” Julian slumps back in the chair, sighing heavily. “I just wish I could be sure what’s going to happen to them.”

“Maybe nothing.” There’s a scoff from the other side of the table, but Noel shushes him, teeth tugging on his bottom lip as he tries to untangle the ideas slipping through his mind, molten and golden. “Honestly, think about it. You’ve read that diary from cover to cover. So have I. How many times did it mention twins?” 

There is a long moment of nothing. Time and silence.

“None.”

“Exactly. Maybe, whatever it is, you already solved it by not having _one_ son.”

“Can’t’ve. Grandfather Barnabas wrote that the curse was until something happened _again_. He wasn’t a twin. Arthur and Walter are something new, not a repeat.” 

Julian pushes his chair back and crosses the room, coming to stand by the big glass doors that lead out onto the balcony. Noel follows. The boys are still chasing each other around the green tufty lawn, shouts of laughter ringing up through the air. He lays a hand between Julian’s shoulder blades, as though he can soothe the grey burrs from his mood. Julian looks over his shoulder at him.

“Remember when they were babies?”

“Yeah,” Noel says, then cocks an eyebrow. “Well. I remember when they were toddlers. Arthur put literally everything in his mouth, and Walter cried for about seventeen months without stopping. And they _both_ started answering every sentence with ‘no’ at the same time.”

“Heh, they did, didn’t they?” Julian steps away from the window, turning to face Noel. “I miss that. Not the crying, just... when they were small. When we had years ahead of us, before they grew up.”

“They’re _six_ , Ju. They’ve not grown up yet.”

“Well. They’re growing too quickly.”

The sun twinkles across the top of Julian’s hair, along the benches and the table runner, pale gold like the beads in the hourglass. Time is ladling itself out lazily in their kitchen. Noel eyes it warily. There’s no point pretending he doesn’t understand its game. Even if he hadn’t planned on mentioning this now, the invitation is there in front of him, writ in sparkling motes of dust.

“We – we could have another,” he says softly, carefully. “If you wanted.”

Julian stares at him, his eyes growing comically wide. Time stalks and circles around the two of them, curling in on itself, changing direction, flowing away in unctuous ripples. 

“How?” Julian breathes finally, and until he hears that tone of bemused curiosity, Noel doesn’t notice that he’s holding his breath. 

He exhales, letting his shoulders relax. Time curls a final loop, and settles like a cat in the corner. 

“Adoption? A surrogate?” He takes Julian’s hand, feeling the slight dryness of winter in his fingertips, in the hills and valleys of his knuckles as he runs his thumb over them. “There’s always ways, if you want to. If you’re serious.”

“I’d – we’d need to talk about it. _Think_ about it.”

“Of course.”

“I mean _really_ think.” Heaviness is settling over his words again. The knotted grey barbs have returned already. “We don’t know what’ll happen to me if the boys don’t inherit this bloody curse. I don’t want... if it’s something awful, I don’t want to leave you three alone.”

“We wouldn’t _be_ alone,” Noel says gently, tightening his hand around Julian’s, skimming the other one up and over his bicep. “We’ve got Julia. Your mum, her mum. We’re all family, Ju. Anyway,” he adds, feeling those stormy prickles start to soften, “nothing’s _going_ to happen.”

“You sure?”

He shrugs. “Things have always worked out before. Why wouldn’t they now?”

He weathers Julian’s stare for the second time in as many minutes. This one lasts longer than before, and just as Noel’s about to open his mouth to add something, _anything_ to soothe him, Julian laughs, shaking his head with obvious disbelief.

“For someone so,” he breaks off, gesturing at Noel’s mismatched plaid socks and feather-fringed red scarf, “you make everything sound so easy.” He wraps his arms around Noel, murmuring the next words into the top of his hair. “It’s one of the reasons I love you.”

“Sentimental twat,” Noel replies, but he returns the hug, squeezing Julian tight round the belly, head against his chest. He waits like that for what seems an eternity, half a minute of heartbeats drumming deep within Julian’s blood, counting the seconds as they pass. Falling, infallibly, like beads in an hourglass.

“You grab the cutlery,” he says, when he finally lets go. “I’ll get the boys.”

He slips out onto the balcony, turning his head toward the sun as he listens to the sounds of silverware clanking. In his mind’s eye, he watches Julian rummage through the kitchen drawers. “Arthur! Walter! Lunch is ready.”

Lunch. Forks, knives, salad spoons. Six years ago, today, fifteen years from now. 

The boys run for the back door, squealing and whooping in delight. Noel watches until they’re out of sight. Then he turns, the sun warming his back, and heads inside towards his future.


	19. August 2023

_August, 2023: Julian is 45 and 55, Noel is 50_  
\--

The first thing Julian notices is the weather. The park he’s standing in is warm and bright, slathered in golden sun like a honey cake the gods have glazed with lemon frosting. He basks with his eyes closed for a moment, relishing the heat seeping into his limbs. Five minutes ago he’d been in an icy, fog-drowned January day which had hardly made it to three degrees, much to Noel’s disgust. They’d spent it exactly like they had the other nine days of the new year so far: indoors, with Noel wearing two pairs of socks and wrapped in his thickest robe, practically hugging the radiator. This sudden sunshine is enough to defrost Julian almost instantly. Within the minute he’s tugged off his jacket and jumper, and loosened the top two buttons on his shirt. It’s an unexpected surprise. Normally when he slips – and especially in the flurry of travels that have punctuated these last six months – he’ll end up shivering somewhere colder than his real time, in the sullen, moody dregs of October or a freezing March evening. The warmth of today is a very welcome change.

The second thing he notices is how many people are about. Walkers, runners, parents pushing buggies or with children in tow, couples strolling hand in hand. Londoners doing what they do best on the four properly sunny days each summer deigns to gift them. There are knots of teenagers sitting cross-legged by the duck pond to his right, laughing at their phones and each other. Gaggles of children chase one another up and down the paths spiralling out to the edges of the green.

There’s something familiar about the park. It tugs at the corners of his memory, pulling at distant scenes of winter trees and brown grass, clouds of his own breath steaming out in front of him. Julian turns a slow circle, trying to pinpoint the thing that’s battering the inside of his brain. People duck past and around him in a steady stream.

People. He stops dead mid-turn, his heart hammering. There’s a duck in front of him, quacking ferociously at the gangly ducklings weaving in and out of the poppies next to the pond. The footsteps of passersby echo its noise and his pulse with a rhythmic thump. Thump. Thump.

He’s just appeared out of thin air, in a park filled with _dozens_ of people, and not one of them has batted an eyelid.

Exhaling a slow, shaky breath, Julian looks down at his feet, stamping them against the spongy green grass. He can hear them thunk against the ground. He can feel them and see them, so he’s not miraculously invisible, and he’s probably not dreaming – or at least, if he is, it’s a damn sight more realistic than any he’s had in his forty-five years so far. He scans upwards; his legs and hands are also visible. He glances surreptitiously left and right, checking the faces he can see carefully. The eyes of strangers pass over him like he’s any other Londoner out for a walk on a summer day. There are no whispers, no one pointing or gasping. Nothing to suggest he’s anything other than commonplace.

He’s just turning back to the pond, which is still bleating in a corner of his mind, when he sees a lean man in trainers materialise in front of him. 

For the second time in as many minutes, Julian’s breath catches in his throat. His heart goes skittering across to the wrong side of his chest. “Jesus _Christ_ ,” he breathes, staring after the man, who has strolled casually across the park after a moment’s consultation of his watch. Julian rubs at his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. Either he’s more tired than the thought, or he’s hallucinating.

He lets his hand drop back to his side, blinks a few times for good measure, and turns his attention back to the duck pond. It’s exhaustion. Got to be. Pushing the image of a grown man appearing out of nowhere to the very back of his mind, he tries again to concentrate on what it is about it that’s niggling at him. 

He manages a good second-and-a-half of pond contemplation before a woman with a dog blinks into existence on the other side of it.

“What the f-” he starts, but as he does, his brain finally catches up to his eyesight. All over the park – right in front of him, in his periphery, on the farthest edges of the tree-lined paths – there are people appearing and disappearing in plain sight, and no one seems concerned in the slightest. Like it happens all the time.

Because it obviously happens _all_ the time.

_It’s the future_ , Julian realises, certainty sliding into place with a thud. _I’m in the fucking_ future.

An old, half-buried memory stirs: him and his dad, at the cinema, not long after he started slipping. Two hours of ridiculous speculation, of time travel made amusing, that had made him feel a hundred times better about his cursed inheritance. Other memories follow hard on its heels. The day he’d heard about the sequel; the trip with his friends at Reading to see it, clustered up the back of the cinema and grimly hoping all the while that he wouldn’t slip that afternoon. Curiously, Julian peers at his surroundings again, a small flicker of excitement growing in his belly.

There are no hoverboards to be seen.

“Typical,” he mutters.

Watching teleportation – _teleportation_! he marvels inwardly – in action soon makes up for the lack of childhood nostalgia. It’s decidedly odd to see people popping in and out of being, and for the first time in a very long while, he’s struck with how off-putting his own appearances must have been for anyone unfortunate enough to catch a glimpse. He drops to the ground in a patch of free space just to the right of the pond, happy to sit cross-legged in the sunshine and watch the wonders his future is going to hold. 

People watching is a whole lot more intense if you don’t know where they’re coming from or going to.

After several minutes, Julian’s seen enough to realise that the people around him are appearing and disappearing in clusters of time, all from different points in the park but at regular intervals, like passengers on buses. Without fail they all consult a phone or a watch as they appear or before they vanish. He’s wondering if whatever powers the ability is timed, if there are teleportation routes around the city or if you can literally zap yourself anywhere you like, and whether animals need special programming or if they can just tag along with their owners’ planned trip, when he notices two boys wandering up the rise on the other side of the pond.

They’re lanky teens with easy smiles. They trade unheard, carefree banter back and forth with an intimacy that goes beyond mere siblings. They’re twins.

His twins.

As they approach, he can see how much they’ve grown; they must be nearly as tall as he is. They’re both too skinny, their arms and legs too long for their bodies, just like his were as a teenager. Their hair is unruly, thick and straight like Julia’s, and glossy in the sun, Walter’s as dark as his own and Arthur’s the colour of dried wheat. Right behind them, he spots himself; older as well, of course, but not showing it too badly, if he does say so. His future self looks better than he currently feels, peaceful, almost vibrant in the sunshine beating down on him. He’s cut his hair short and is sporting at least a week’s growth of beard. Julian wonders if it’s for a role; Noel isn’t normally a fan of anything beyond a light stubble. 

As he thinks his name, his lover wanders into view.

Julian’s heart gives a tiny thump against his ribcage. For all the back and forth along their timelines, he’s never actually seen the silly, pretty thing in his future. He looks almost the same, skinny indigo jeans in spite of the heat, an orange and purple striped t-shirt, gold Chelsea boots and a floppy-brimmed black hat. A smile starts to bloom on Julian’s face, then he notices what Noel is carrying: a big paper gift bag covered in splotches of colour and two silver foil balloons, one in the shape of a 1, the other in a 6.

Sixteen. The twins’ birthday.

Before the smile can die completely and his mind fill with fretful scenarios and unanswerable what ifs, a little girl in a bright red dress comes running up behind Noel, clutching him around one leg. Her dark hair pulled into pigtails at the sides of her head, secured with long purple ribbons. She can’t be much more than two or three. Noel laughs at the tiny creature, hands the balloons to Arthur, and swings her up off the ground, above his head, then back down again as she shrieks in glee. 

As Julian watches him repeat the performance, twice, three times, the girl’s dress blazing a streak of colour through the air, everything snaps suddenly, firmly into place. The duck pond, decades ago, when the trees branches were bare of leaves and covered in frost. That tiny, sandy-haired toddler in the bright red parka, the same colour as this child’s dress. The toddler grown, a young boy now, waving like he knew something from the window of a- 

Julian turns, his palms suddenly sweaty in a way that has nothing to do with the heat of the day. And there it is: a carmine awning nestled away between the trees that line the park, so full and green they almost obscure it entirely. He squints at it until he can make out the faint lines of gilt lettering on its window.

_You’ve come back so many times. To me._

Noel’s voice reverberates through his skull, young and unsure, and filled with more wisdom than seven generations of Pettifer men.

_You said you go places more often if they’re important_.

It’s always been leading here. All the quick, confusing slips; the half glimpses; the reminders and hints. They were all for today. For the psychedelic sun his universe spins around, and the binary stars that orbit between them.

Julian turns slowly away from the sweets shop, back to those stars on the other side of the pond. 

They’re watching him. As one, they break into a grin as his eyes meet theirs. Arthur twists around to tug on the hem of Noel’s t-shirt and points at him, and suddenly there’s a third set of eyes on him, sparkling with cheek.

His future self is currently bent over double, listening to the little girl with the pigtails, who is pointing at a calico bag and wearing the face of toddlers the world over who have something Very Important to tell their audience. He’s doing quite a good job of looking serious, Julian thinks. It’s almost a full minute before he notices the three men in a line to his right, waving at the other side of the lake with grins for miles. When he finally follows their gaze and his eyes meet Julian’s own, he too gives a smile. Straightening up, he keeps hold of the little girl’s hand with one of his, and waves with the other. He gives a quick little shrug, somehow wry and amused and resigned all at once, the slight lift of his shoulders calling, “Well, we made it, I guess,” across the watery space between them.

Julian doesn’t know what else to do, so he waves back, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. 

The little girl tugs her hand out of his other’s, moving towards the bag she was pointing at earlier. As she tries to lift it up, Walter breaks out of line to help her, drawing a tartan picnic blanket out of the depths and spreading it out behind them. Arthur hoists a square cane basket that’s sitting off to one side, ties the balloons he’s still holding around the handle of it, and sets it on one corner of the blanket. 

The last thing he sees is Noel take his hat off, ruffle his hair back into place, and wink at him before trotting over to his future self’s side.

When he slips back into his flat, Noel is still huddled on the rug in his robe, his back to Julian and head in a book, feet as close to the radiator as possible. Sheets of ice are patterned across the windows, crusting into ridges in the corners. It’s barely gone 3pm and is already almost dark.

But it’s okay. His future, their future, is coming, and it’s filled with laughter and sunshine.


	20. June 1995

_June, 1995: Noel is 22 and 44, Julian is 49_  
\--

His last slip is without warning or pain: one second he’s sitting in the first cold hours of 2018, listening to Noel potter about in the kitchen as he makes “just one more” cup of tea, and the next he’s in the middle of a balmy afternoon, on a grassy expanse that tugs at the distant corners of his memory. There’s a large building a few hundred feet away, red brick dappled in sunlight, and the pale grey branches of a birch spreading over his head. 

The pieces tumble and slide into place as he walks across the grass and through the arching entryway.

Hundreds of students are milling about inside the courtyard. Some are still in casual clothes, running to and fro with stricken expressions, but most are sweeping by in flowing robes towards a large hall on the right, their felt caps tucked under one arm or already fixed in place on their head. Julian spots Noel after a mere half-minute, leaning rakishly against the corner of hall, his flat-boarded black cap set askew over short pixie-cut hair. His fringe is long and falling into his eyes, as usual, joined this time by the tassel of his cap. At that moment, as though he can feel the weight of Julian’s eyes, he glances up to look straight at him.

There’s time for a satisfied smile to bloom across his face before a bell tolls and the remainder of students start scurrying for the doors of the hall, caps being jammed into place as they go, whirlpools of robes swirling in all directions. A middle-aged man dressed in the burnished red robes of a professor positions himself by a door on the far side of the hall and starts calling in a deep, carrying voice.

“Family and friends, this way please. This way, family and friends. Over here, this way please.”

Which is how Julian finds himself swept into a tide of parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers, and seated up the back of Noel’s college graduation.

The ceremony, once it starts, seems to stretch on into eternity. At least ten speakers precede the calling of the roll, and Julian spends a good forty minutes listening to them absently while fighting the internal panic that he’s gong to slip back home as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrived here, but this time with several hundred witnesses. It’s only as the first round of students are being called to the stage that he gives up struggling and starts to focus on the litany of names, reasoning once again that surely, _surely_ , if he _had_ vanished in the middle of Noel’s graduation, Noel would have found a place to mention it at some point in the last two decades. It’s not as comforting a thought as it should be, especially when he remembers that Noel has found any number of things not to tell him about over the years, always with a disarming smile and the excuse that he knew he shouldn’t, that Julian himself had warned him not to say too much. But his body’s showing every sign of settling in for the cursed equivalent of a long-haul flight – and in any case, he reminds himself, there’s no beads left after this one. Whatever happens here, whatever he returns to, he’ll never have to survive another slip to a frozen day in his past, or suffer through a three-day migraine when he’s finally dumped back into his proper time after a week solid of slipping in and out of history.

“Fielding, Noel.”

The announcement jerks Julian’s attention back to the stage where Noel is walking out with pigeon toes and an impish grin, doffing his hand to his cap as he walks towards the principal. Julian can’t help his burgeoning smile; he leans forward, peering down at a moment he missed all those years ago, before he knew how much it would matter to him. Chest suffused with warmth, he claps along with the rest of the guests, his eyes suddenly watery and cheeks just about splitting. Noel pauses for the photo with his principal, shakes his hand one final time, and crosses the stage to take his place next to his friends. As he shuffles into position, he lifts his head to the gathered audience. 

He’s too far back to be seen, he knows, but Julian has the sense that Noel has found him anyway in that sea of far-off faces.

Line by line, students are called, photographed, and handed their degrees. Eventually the last one is conferred, and they file out after the closing address, flashing smiles and waves as they process down the centre of the hall and into their futures. There’s now a huge festival tent filling the courtyard, laden with trestle tables and beverage stands. Julian finds himself swept along once again into an assortment of relatives, friends, and teachers, all milling around in clusters nibbling sandwiches, or waving excitedly and fussing over their particular graduate.

Julian flits from corner to corner of the undercover buffet, a plastic cup of juice in one hand and a triangle of cucumber-and-cheese in the other. He scans the faces around him carefully as he goes, his eyes constantly searching for Noel’s parents. Aged or not, he’s not taking any chances; they don’t know him yet and absolutely _cannot_ be allowed to recognise him when he finally meets them next year.

His process is hampered by teachers in smart, pressed robes, who waylay him with a smile under their bushy moustaches or over the top of their glasses. They ask the same questions: who he’s here for, and isn’t he proud. He mumbles Noel’s name and that yes, he is, and he’d love to chat but he’s just got to pop over there, sorry.

“You remind me of that friend of his,” says one dark-haired professor, as Julian tries to slink away. “Julian... something or other.”

“Yeah,” says Julian, looking around quickly in case the wrong ears overhear. “Yeah, I’m his, ah, uncle. Uncle- Pedro.”

“Pedro? Spanish, eh?” 

“Well, it’s an honorary name. I lived in Spain, actually.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, for a few years. Well, a decade. As a monk.” 

At that last word, Noel pops into view over near the sandwiches. His eyes catch Julian’s; he gives a smirk, lifts an eyebrow, and disappears out through a tent flap.

“Listen, it was great to meet you,” Julian says, already moving, “but I’ve just got to-”

By the time he’s fought his way through the crowd and outside, Noel’s on the farthest edge of the courtyard, lounging in the shade on a small set of stairs.

“Haven’t seen you for a while,” he says when Julian’s made his way across to him, glancing up sideways through his eyelashes with a grin. “You’re as handsome as always.”

“Rubbish,” Julian replies, instinctively matching the teasing tone of Noel’s voice with mock self-deprecation. He sits beside Noel on the lowest stair, stretching out his legs. “Where’s the real me?”

“Somewhere else, innit.”

“Noel.” 

“Edinburgh.”

Julian twists around at that to look at him properly. “Edinburgh? What the bloody hell am I doing there?” 

“Something for the Fringe.” Noel shrugs, and climbs to his feet. “I dunno. It doesn’t start for another month, but you got a call yesterday and took off in a panic.”

Julian casts his mind back to his early years on the circuit, trying to remember what had been special about the Fringe Festival that particular year. He remembers not being able to go to Noel’s graduation – he’d definitely been invited, a classic last minute affair that began with a throwaway line from Dave one night at the pub and ended with Noel rummaging through a sock drawer for the tickets he’d been allocated, two of which he’d been supposed to give to his parents the previous week and had forgotten about entirely. 

There _had_ been a phone call, Julian recalls. Some admin bollocks he’d stuffed up for the Open Mic Award entry. The next year, when Noel had entered, he’d been very careful to help him fill the forms in.

“You gonna sit there all day or what?” Noel’s voice breaks into his reverie abruptly. Julian pulls himself to his feet.

“Where are we going?”

Noel shrugs. “Away from that lot.” He gestures with one hand back towards the tent, where a steady stream of people are moving in and out, plastic cups and hors d’ouvres in hand.

“Sounds good to me.”

He follows Noel’s lead out of the courtyard and soon finds himself on a meandering tour of the college grounds. They wander between buildings and along corridors, chatting all the while about what Noel’s plans are now, what Julian’s younger self has been focussing on lately, who their mutual friends are. Every so often Noel rests a hand on his arm, or reaches up to brush at the newly-shortened curls of his hair; small, soft affections that send shivers through Julian’s spine. When they reach the farthest buildings of the campus, Noel falls silent beside him. They stand there, side by side, looking out into a world drenched in summer sun as seconds and minutes of the past tick by in Julian’s ears.

“D’you remember that day on the football pitch?” Noel murmurs, turning to face him. There’s a light of mischief in his eyes that’s somehow enhanced by his too-long fringe, by the thoughtful smile playing on his plump pink lips. He runs the tips of his fingers over the line of stubble on Julian’s jaw as he continues speaking. “How you wouldn’t tell me about us? About what we were? Are.” 

He runs the tip of a finger down Julian’s neck, from ear to collarbone, pressing in closer so that Julian’s forced to take a step back, then another. On his third, he collides with a wall. 

“We are, aren’t we?” Noel continues. “Still. I’m all over you.” That smile, never innocent, becomes a smirk. “Least, I could be all over you, if you took me someplace else.”

Julian swallows, fighting down the urge to reverse their positions, to push the skinny, fey creature up against the brickwork and silence him properly. Instead he reaches up to grasp Noel’s wrists – so narrow, like bird bones – and gently pushes those searching hands away from his body.

That’s all it takes for Noel to step backwards with a sigh.

“You’re still so shy,” he says flatly, all traces of play gone. “I can’t work you out sometimes. You’re right there with me and you seem so – like you want _something_ , but then you’re gone before I can even ask. I just... I wish I knew what you wanted. What I am for you.”

His words – so unsure, now, so young and awkward – catch Julian sharply in the chest. He clears his throat, trying to quiet the thrumming in his blood. 

“You’re magic,” he replies softly. “You’re everything. But I can’t-”

“I know.” Noel sighs again, repeating as if by rote. “You can’t tell me when, or how, or why. That’s okay. I get that. I just wanted to know, are we… happy? I can ask that much, can’t I? Are we okay?”

It’s not sadness that colours Noel’s voice, not quite, but it twists that barb in Julian’s chest just the same. He studies the man before him, on the brink of his whole life and so beautifully, _frighteningly_ real, and it hits him with a thud: he’s loved this face, this mind, this ludicrous, incredible human for twenty years or more. Since this year he’s standing in, or possibly even earlier, possibly from the moment Noel interrupted him and Dave to breathe out an excited string of _brilliant_ ’s and _genius_ ’s in a grimy London pub.

For the second time that day, his eyes well up. Thoughts and memories go crashing through his head as he wonders what he should tell Noel. There’s so much he could say: that they’ll take a flat together in Scotland, and then two in London; that they’ll stay up until four in the morning writing for weeks on end; that they’ll fight, and make up, and that one time Noel will fling a handful of pamphlets at him and stomp off in a sulk. That in 2005, Julian will meet a woman he adores and will try to fulfil the unspoken expectations of his life. That he’ll get married and start a family; that he won’t realise how wrong he was until three years later, when he spends four horrible months repeating a mantra he gave to himself via the other half of his soul. 

There are so many things he could say that will make Noel’s disquiet easier to bear, but it’s too late. He’s gone and lived all those things first. The only thing now that can ensure Noel gets to live them too is silence.

“Yeah,” he says finally, wrapping an arm around Noel’s shoulders. “Yeah, we are.”

“You look tired.” 

“I’m fine. I promise. It’s just the travel, it’s getting… old.” He thinks of the hourglass at home, it’s brassy columns and the single glass bead poised to fall, but he can’t say it’s nearly over, not now. Not with the sun sinking into the last third of its journey and the sweet smell of wildflowers flowing by them on the breeze.

Noel shifts slightly under his arm, turning inward to rest one hand lightly across Julian’s heart. “Ju?”

“Do you call me that already?”

“I do now,” he grins. “Been planning to try it for a while, but you keep on vanishing.”

“Bit rude of me.”

“Very.” He’s fighting back a laugh now, the melancholy creeping out of his voice. “Ju,” he says again, more firmly this time, his palm pressed against Julian’s chest like a brand. “What would you do if I kissed you right now?”

“You can’t.”

“I can. I’m probably going to.”

“No, I mean, you _can’t_. We – the real me, from this time – we haven’t yet. Have we?” It’s not really a question, and he doesn’t need the slight shift of Noel’s gaze in answer. “Noel. I can’t take your first kiss.” 

“Piss off, as if it’s my first!”

“You know what I mean. With me. Don’t you want to save it for when… when we’re together? Properly?”

“We are together properly, somewhere. You’re already going out with me.”

“Yes, but-”

“And anyway, it won’t be the same, will it? When it happens. You won’t be _you_ , I’ll have to learn you from the start.” 

Julian’s not convinced that isn’t deeply flawed logic, but he can’t protest because Noel has already slipped his arms round his middle and pressed that cheeky mouth against his. A rich rush of affection goes swirling through him, right down into the very tips of his fingers and toes. As he wraps Noel up in his arms, the lines of a poem he studied a lifetime ago come floating back to him.

> _-the gracious desire to exist of the flowers  
>  my near ecstasy at existing among them_

Noel hums a contented little noise as their kiss deepens, and the warmth filling Julian solidifies into a perfect, crystalline knowledge that he chose this – this man, this life, exactly as it is now – years ago. Long before he could stop to consider why, he’d thrown away those tired expectations of his ancestry, the plan spoken once at his sixteenth birthday. The marriage, the children, the attempts at normality in spite of the circumstances; all of them have come and gone. It’s the chameleon-swirl of colour in his arms that has always been his compass.

> _-time's left its remnants and qualities for me ___

____

__Julian draws back for a moment, studying the pixie face before him at arm’s length. It’s too young, and too old all at once; it’s the face of a moonbeam who will one day grow into his best friend, his lover, his tether to unreality. He knows, with every fibre of his being, that if he had to do this over, he’d do it again, and again, just the same._ _

__As he thinks it, he laughs with delight – because there it is. Finally. A breath released after three and a half decades. The delirious lifting of a heaviness he has carried his entire adult life and has only now become fully aware of in its absence. _There_ is the final piece of his puzzle. There is the riddle, unlocking itself and bathing him in the light of its open door. _ _

__“What?” Noel asks, blushed and breathless._ _

__“Nothing.” He cups a hand gently to Noel’s cheek. “I just realised something.”_ _

__“You love me a bit?”_ _

__“That too.” Julian kisses him again, on the forehead this time, and wraps a hand around one of Noel’s. “Come on, then,” he says, giving it a gentle tug. “Plenty of time for you to do this when I’m back from Edinburgh.”_ _

__He slips back home as suddenly has he’d slipped into 1995. There’s no pain, no tell-tale pressure at his temples, just a slight rainbow shimmer across the brickwork as he and Noel round the last of the buildings before the main courtyard. He blinks to clear his vision and finds himself back in his own house, cold and silent, with the first light of 2018 bleeding under the kitchen blinds._ _

__He slips off his shoes, padding quietly down the hallway to peer in his bedroom door. Noel’s fast asleep, as he’s expected. Smiling to himself, Julian pulls the door to and makes his way back down the hall to the kitchen. Thumbing the switch on the kettle, he leans back against the counter, filing the thoughts still jostling around in his brain. The boys are at Julia’s until the weekend. His dad won’t be up quite yet – but his grandad probably will. He watches the steam curl up from his cup as he pours the water, thinning and fading in the dim light. Slowly, turning the words he needs over in his head, he drips in a dash of milk. Clutching both his mug and his phone, he slips out of the kitchen and back down the hall into his study._ _

__The hourglass is on a bookshelf, small and innocuous to anyone outside his family. He sets his tea down and plucks it from its place with thumb and forefinger. It’s as cold as ever. The gold glass beads are, to a one, firmly encased in the lower well._ _

__Drawing a breath, Julian turns it upside down. The beads fall to the narrowing and no further. On the bottom, where his name had once been inscribed in thin filigree, is a dark patch of tarnish._ _

__He waits for the clock to hit 7am, then thumbs through the contacts on his phone._ _

__“Ey up, love,” comes his grandmother’s bright voice after the second ring. “What are you about, up so early?”_ _

__“Happy New Year, Gran,” he says. “How are you?”_ _

__She’s always been one for a chat, and the first morning of a new year is more deserving than most times. It’s ten minutes before Julian can even ask about his grandad’s whereabouts, and another five before she passes the phone to him with an admonishment that her only grandson should call more often._ _

__“A’right, lad?” his grandad says, once Julian has promised he’ll do just that. “Can bare get a word in with your gran about. Go on, love,” he adds, his voice dimming as though he’s turned his head away. “Pop us on a brew. Now, lad. How’s London?”_ _

__It’s another fifteen minutes of pleasantries and updates, stories about the boys and assurances that yes, they’re well, surviving the winter, before he has the strength to ask the question that’s been roiling around his mind for the last hour._ _

__“Grandad, I – I wanted to ask you something. About the ah, the hourglass.”_ _

__“Aye?”_ _

__“It’s sort of – personal.”_ _

__“Go on, then.”_ _

__“Was grandma your… first? Your first love?”_ _

__There’s a long silence on the other end of the line. When his grandad finally speaks, it’s in a voice thick with the secrets of centuries._ _

__“No,” he whispers, and then clears his throat to repeat it. “No. But why-”_ _

__“What about gread-grandfather Wilfred?”_ _

__“What-”_ _

__“Please. Go along with me.”_ _

__“I’m not sure.” His grandad sighs heavily into the phone. “I don’t think so. He kept a… a locket, I think it were. Belonged to my mum’s sister. He’d been engaged to her, years before, when they were both young. She died early. The wasting sickness, I think it were.” He sighs again. “He loved my mum blind, but I know he never really forgot Aunt Catherine. What’s this about, eh?”_ _

__“I think I figured something out.” Julian thinks of his dad, thirty or more years ago, sitting beside him on his narrow bed after his first girlfriend had dumped him, trying to comfort him in the best way he could. “I- I’ll tell you about it soon, a’right?”_ _

__“Aye, lad, as tha’ wish.”_ _

__“Give gran my love.”_ _

__“Will do. Tarra, Jules.” There’s warmth in his voice now, familiar from the earliest reaches of Julian’s memory._ _

__“Tarra, grandad,” he smiles._ _

__He lays his phone face down on the table when he hangs up, and leans back in his chair, sucking absently at the inside of his cheek. The hourglass glints dully on the desk in front of him, catching the first rays of morning light. He pushes back, crosses to where it had been sitting, and pulls the weathered brown book down from its shelf._ _

__Five Pettifers before him and not one of them had ever mentioned a previous lover._ _

__He sinks back into his chair, the diary in hand, leafing through its pages as his thoughts settle. That image of his father comes back to him anew. He’d sat beside Julian in his room that night, one arm around his shoulders, telling him it would be alright, that there’d be another. He’d told him the story of the girl from Denmark he’d known long before he’d met Julian’s mum, and how he’d thought his heart would split in two when her family moved to the other side of the world. How time would heal everything._ _

__Julian hadn’t been able to find the words to say that he hadn’t really minded that much, it was just that Emma had done it in front of everyone, and now people kept looking at him, asking in hushed tones if he’s okay._ _

___I was the first with any chance_ , he thinks to himself sadly. His dad, his grandad – all of them, he’s willing to bet – they had no choice in the matter. Their first loves had passed them by, or been snatched away, like his great-grandfather Barnabas and that poor Romani girl. He was the first who’d been given the opportunity to choose. _ _

__The faint sounds of his choice waking up come drifting down the hallway. Julian counts down as the steps shuffle closer. _Three. Two. One.__ _

__On cue, Noel pokes a bleary head in through the study door. “What happened?” he asks around a yawn. “Where’d you go?”_ _

__“Your graduation.”_ _

__A dreamy smile spreads across Noel’s face as he slips into the study. “I was wondering when that happened,” he says, perching on the edge of Julian’s desk. “I thought maybe you’d already done it and just not told me.”_ _

__“I can see why. You were a right tart.”_ _

__“You were a pervert, kissing impressionable young boys.”_ _

__“Shut up.” Julian pushes out of his chair, wraps his arms around Noel for the second time that night and silences him with a kiss._ _

__This one is familiar, fifteen years – or more if he counts all the times he visited – melding together in a perfect point of contact, fitting closer than puzzle pieces. Noel smiles against his mouth, warm like sunshine in the cold January air. A memory filters into Julian’s mind: a park, dappled with sun and science-fiction made real, and a family of five celebrating in the way that only those with nothing to fear can. Himself, five years ago and five years from now. That look he’ll give to his past iteration. _It’s alright. You work it out. You make it here and everything is just as it should be.__ _

__Noel draws back in his arms, interrupting his thoughts with a cheeky grin. “Better than twenty-two year old me?” he asks, and Julian knows he’s fucked for an answer either way._ _

__“All the you’s are perfect.”_ _

____

_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> My last fic says I took nearly a year to write it. This has taken nearly six. Dedicated to Cherie, who first put the idea of a time-travelling Julian into my head - I will never forgive you for this, Chef. ♥ 
> 
> I started this immediately after my previous epic, [Excuses for Why We Failed at Love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/784458/) ([Dreamwidth version](https://stowaway.dreamwidth.org/tag/series:+excuses)), which was written as a joint wish-fulfilment celebration for Noel and Julian's 40th and 45th birthdays. I didn't mean for it to take this long, but there you go. This was written during the moments of silence between 2013 and 2018, and is a joint wish-fulfilment celebration for Noel's 45th and Julian's 50th birthdays.
> 
> I was inspired by many things over the course of the past five years, most obviously The Time Traveler's Wife, but also Doctor Who, many works of fiction and poetry, several songs (almost all of them pop-punk emo bollocks), and the daily meanderings that pass through my problematic mind. If you think you recognise it from somewhere else, you probably do; no copyright infringement was intended and no money is being made here. Yes, I am aware that one word in chapter two is now considered a slur, which is why the only people who use it are old white dudes in the 1980's. Yes, there were indeed massive thunderstorms in London during August 2001, and I am beyond thrilled that I live in age where I can research this without having to dig through endless pages of historical archives at the national library. The art at the start of chapter one is my own, please do not reproduce/repost it anywhere.
> 
> Thank you especially to Tea for the beta read and helpful suggestions. Any remaining errors are mine; please feel free to point out my typos. Thanks also to everyone who encouraged me to finish this, regardless of how long it's been since I started - your support means the world to me. 
> 
> Mirrored at [Dreamwidth](https://stowaway.dreamwidth.org/tag/series:+ttw).


End file.
